


even the moon is drunk

by zadonis



Category: 4minute (Band), Pentagon (Korea Band), Triple H (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - 365 FRESH, Alternate Universe - America, Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Crimes & Criminals, F/M, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Minor Character Death, Multi, Murder, Suicidal Thoughts, Threesome - F/M/M, Violence, basically if you've seen the 365 Fresh mv this contains all of those things, possibly excessive use of drugs
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-17
Updated: 2018-02-15
Packaged: 2018-11-15 02:37:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 24,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11221524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zadonis/pseuds/zadonis
Summary: “I’ve got no plans and a road that leads to everywhere. You’re more than welcome to come along, if you want?”a 365 fresh au where hui is desperate to feel something real, hyuna just wants to be loved, hyojong hears death singing to him, and then they all end up together for the better





	1. HUI

**Author's Note:**

> This first chapter is from Hui's point of view, basically talking about his back story that I kind of created for him because while I was watching the video I wondered why he was being chased and what led him to steal the car and all that, so this is going to explain it. Next chapter will cover Hyuna's back story, and the third will be about Hyojong, and then it will get to the three of them. This story is going to move slow probably since I'm writing it like it's a detailed version of the music video with like way more ot3 moments because I absolutely love the three of them together since they're all beautiful people.

Hui had always been accustomed to living the lifestyle of the rich and famous. His father married into a rich family when Hui was still young, and Hui’s stepmother was one of the richest women he’d ever known. She lived the perfect life of the rich, where she had a tailor who made all of her clothes by hand, she went to every Fashion Week around the planet, had seven homes spread around the globe, and if she ever got into any trouble (which she tended to do since drunk driving seemed to be like a sport to the rich and famous) then she paid her way out of it.

Wealth was Hui’s lifestyle. Silk shirts and pressed trousers, a maid and chef and butler at his beck and call. He never had a problem in life; he slid through school scoring perfectly average grades and invitations onto sports teams, to parties, and to universities all because his daddy had money. Hui’s life was grand – wild parties filled with all the alcohol, women, and drugs a man could want.

And then the world came crashing down around his ears.

The police came ringing at quarter past four in the morning, headlights glaring off the windows on the front of his stepmother’s mansion, and Hui swore up and down that the police had hogtied him and thrown him into the backseat of their car before bringing him home. He had a bloody lip and a bruised arm from fighting back when the officer confiscated the packet of coke from his pocket and the flask he’d tried to hide down his sock. He didn’t see what it mattered. It’s not like he was going to really get into trouble because his dad and stepmother would pay his way out. And he was almost twenty-one, they wouldn’t throw him in jail for drinking, and they wouldn’t do it for the drugs either because it would ruin the rest of his life, and he was meant to be going off to Stanford in a few weeks to start the semester. They couldn’t really, actually arrest him, could they?

They didn’t.

Hui noticed the cash slipping from his father’s palm into each of the officers’ hands when they shook hands after depositing Hui on the doorstep. He knew that as soon as the squad car pulled away, his father’s tone would change from the reprimanding façade he put on in front of the cops, and he’d wither away into the aging man that Hui knew him to be, and he’d yawn and tell Hui to get to bed, to just go to Church on Sunday and pray for forgiveness. Hui knew his parents were used to his behavior; his stepmother behaved the same way until she got pregnant with Emma two years before, and now their sweet little angel was the sole reason that Hui’s stepmother no longer went out to the clubs to sample the newest and nicest drugs and drinks. She still went to every Fashion Week, and just a few months before the whole family had flown over to Nice in France to stay at her house there, but anymore, Hui was the only one who lived the wild and crazy lifestyle that he’d been raised in.

“Get the fuck out.” His father growled, pointing into the darkness as the squad car’s headlights faded down the drive. “I’m so tired of your shit, Hui. You can’t be this way anymore! You’re nearly twenty-one years old, and you’ve got a little sister now. I can’t have you bringing any of your shit like that home, okay? We want a good life for her, one that’s not corrupted by drugs and this ridiculous bullshit that you do!”

Hui’s father had never once in his life laid a hand on him, but as they stood there together in the light of the entryway, the front door standing wide open to let in the dead heat of a summer dawn and the sound of crickets and birds that were soon waking up, Hui felt like his father had slapped him across the face. His cheeks burned and his fists clenched at his side.

Maybe he was still a bit drunk. Maybe the drugs hadn’t quite left his system yet. But there was something that affected him right then because he started laughing to almost an hysterical degree. His mad laughter echoed around the entryway, bouncing off the walls hung with artwork that cost thousands of dollars each, rebounded off the expensive marble floors and the chandelier that hung off the three story space above them. Hui leaned back until his head cracked against the wall and he slumped back against it, still laughing.

His father stared at him, tired in general and tired of his son. He slammed the front door of the house, and still Hui laughed.

“You want a good life for her? One without drugs and my bullshit?” Hui pushed off the wall and swaggered over toward his father, stabbing a finger in his direction. “You want a life for Emma that’s pure and clean? Why do you want it for her? Why didn’t you want it for me, Dad? Huh?” He laughed again, and now maybe it was a combination of lack of sleep, alcohol, and drugs or maybe it was years of this life, of being neglected within the cold walls of this mansion finally catching up with Hui. “Why did you raise me in a life like this, and now you hate me for the way that you made me, Dad? Why, Daddy?” And then his hysterical laughter that turned to anger turned again into tears.

He clutched at the front of his father’s shirt, and he was half a foot taller than his father, but he crumpled against his chest like he was six years old. Hui pressed his wet cheeks against his father’s shoulders, rubbed his nose against the collar of his shirt, and he wrinkled the fabric between his fingers until Hui was almost certain that he would never be able to let go.

“Hui.” His father’s voice was as solemn as death. “I’m sorry we made you like this, but you need to straighten the fuck up, and you won’t do that as long as you’re here, as long as Karen and I are here to bail you out every time you fuck your life up. You have to go. I’ll give you tonight to pack your shit, but you’re out of here by noon tomorrow. No exceptions.”

So Hui’s life crumpled around him as he tore through the halls on his way to his bedroom, and he was almost twenty-one years old, but that didn’t stop him from throwing a temper tantrum. He ripped the art off the walls of his bedroom, pried the TV off the wall and threw all 54-inches of it against the jewelry case in his closet. He grabbed all the watches and bracelets and necklaces his stepmother had spent fortunes on over the years for him, and he considered throwing them down the toilet, sending them into the sewer with all the rest of the shit this city spewed out.

As dawn lit the edges of the city, painting the sky blue and purple and magenta and gold, Hui stuffed his bags with the gold and diamonds, the silver and whatever the hell else he had, and he packed up his clothes. He packed away his stash of coke and weed and the really secret stash of expensive jewelry and phones that he’d pilfered from acquaintances and family friends over the years. Then he left.

And as the new day grew around him, bleeding with light and heat, Hui knew that the life that waited before him would be different. It would be better than the life that his father and stepmother had been giving him before because it would be his own.

Hui had cash, he had credit cards, and he had friends.

The first few days, he crashed on couches of friends and in beds of girls whose names he forgot as soon as they said them. He spent his days in clubs, smoking and snorting whatever there was, drinking until the world was just a pretty colored blur around him, and his phone buzzed almost endlessly in his pocket with phonecalls from his father. But fuck that old man. He’d thrown Hui out! At least that’s what Hui’s friends always said every time that the phone rang and the screen lit up with his father’s face and name.

“Fuck your old man!” Tucker shouted, upending half a bottle of vodka on Hui’s phone. “Bastard threw you out! Now he’s calling to check up on you or some shit? Who does he think he is?”

And Hui’s life spiraled.

He had all the cash and the girls and the drugs. He showed up to the first day of the semester at Stanford higher than Heaven, and when he left campus that day, he never went back. Fuck college. He had his friends, the girls, and he had new friends he was making all the time at the clubs. He was making money, scamming people in the back room card games, and he was stealing glitzy jewelry off the hands and necks of girls as he kissed them. Life was good for the time being.

The sex, the drugs, and the careless lifestyle he was living stopped being enough after a few weeks. Hui didn’t feel the rush of life whenever he stepped into the club and instantly spotted the girl he’d go home with or the dealer who’d sell him the best shit. Hui needed that something that would make him feel like his nerve endings were on fire.

“Grand larceny, bro.” Tucker told him one night as they hung out at Tucker’s parents’ pool. The strange blue light reflected off the side of Tucker’s face as he blew smoke up into the air. “Like real grand larceny, not that bottomline minimum cheap ass number that the law says is larceny. I’m talking like upwards of $50,000 kind of larceny. I did that once. I’ve never felt as good as I did when I got away with breaking into that house and stealing all their tech.” He shook his head and took another drag off the joint.

“You think I could do that?” Hui asked. He was floating in the water just on the edge of the pool, but then he reached up and took the joint from Tucker. “You really think I could commit a crime that big and get away with it? Do you think it would really give me a rush too?”

Tucker rolled over onto his side so they were face-to-face. “Yeah, man. I’ll help you out. It’s been too long since I did something like that.”

They picked out a gambling den in Chinatown. Tucker assured Hui that he’d been there once; they had a lot of cash, and surprisingly low security. It was the perfect place to hit. All they had to do was dress nicely for the occasion, looking as rich as Hui had been before he was thrown out.

“All the clients there are loaded. We’d be out of place if we didn’t dress up in your old clothes.” Tucker told Hui as they tried on the entirety of Hui’s wardrobe. “I look hot as shit in this suit, by the way.”

Hui ignored Tucker because he had more important things on his mind. He thought about their plan, about how the nervousness he was feeling was the first real thing he’d felt in the weeks since being thrown out, and that he wasn’t sure how they were actually going to pull this off. But Hui dressed as nicely as he could, nicer than he had since before he was thrown out. He wore pressed trousers and a silky blue shirt, polished shoes and the shiniest watches and rings that he’d taken from home.

They left Tucker’s home looking like millionaires, and when they rolled up a block away from the gambling den, they stuck out like sore thumbs. Tucker’s Maserati glowed pure white on the street, and people stared as they stepped out.

“You’re sure we’re in the right place?” Hui asked, pushing his hair back off his forehead with one hand. “No offense, but this doesn’t quite look like the place you were describing, and these people look like they’ve never seen someone with even half the money we’ve got.” He looked over at Tucker.

“This is the place. It’s a block away, but we can’t pull up right in front of there, that’d look suspicious. It’s called White Dragon. Swear.” He stepped up beside Hui and slapped his shoulder. “Let’s go in.” Behind them the car beeped as Tucker locked it, and he slipped the keys into his pocket before walking down the street to the building like he was the coolest motherfucker in the city. Hui followed, feeling trepidation.

In minutes, they were sitting at a table, lost in the back of the shop they’d walked into, red velvet curtains covered the walls around them, a veil of smoke added to the dreamy yellow haze provided by the lighting, and low jazz music played somewhere in the background. Tucker’s eyes gleamed like he’d stumbled into an open vault of gold, like he was born to play cards and steal cash. He dropped a pile of coins onto the table with a grin like the moon, and said, “Deal me in.”

Hui was smart enough to sit out. He’d spent enough parties in high school playing strip poker to know that he was horrible at poker, and he’d spent more nights at other clubs scamming his way through all sorts of other card games to know that at this exact moment in his life, it wasn’t worth the risk. He couldn’t lose or scam his way to winning at this game, so he sat beside Tucker like he was one of those pretty floozies that hangs around the high rollers in Vegas.

And just like some of those floozies in Las Vegas, Hui was helping his man cheat.

The spot he was sitting was exactly perfect to be able to see the reflections of all the other players cards in the shiny lamp that hung over their table. He and Tucker had worked out a code before hand. A series of taps and strokes on Tucker’s thigh under the table would indicate which players, what suits and all that kind of stuff.

After a little while, Tucker started losing, and Hui wasn’t sure if he was doing it on purpose or not. “I think it’s time to go,” Tucker whispered after another unsuccessful round. “Ask the dealer where the bathroom is, then go. I’ll meet you in a minute or two.”

The dealer looked at Hui like he was a freak, but he directed him down the hallway out the back, it would be the first door on the right. The hallway was dark, but it took Hui only a minute to find the light switch. While the old lights flickered on slowly, buzzing loudly even on top of the din coming from the gamblers behind him, Hui looked around. The hallway went on for a few feet passed the bathrooms before it took a ninety degree turn to the right, and from the looks of it, it branched off left and right and straight ahead.

“Hey,” a hand gripped his shoulder, and Hui jumped, nearly pissing himself. It was just Tucker. “Hey, sorry, it’s just me. You ready?” Tucker squeezed Hui’s shoulder, nodding down the hall. “Let’s go.”

The smell of smoky air began to clear the further they moved from the backroom gambling. They went straight down the hallway until it forked off again. Hui looked down the right hallway before they took the left, and he wondered how big this place was, because looking at it from the outside, he never would’ve guessed it would’ve had this much room in the back.

“That’s the idea.” Tucker said when Hui whispered that thought out loud. “It keeps the cops from thinking that something illegal’s going on back here.”

They turned a few more corners before Hui finally saw the light at the end of the tunnel, almost literally. At the far end of the hallway they were on, a door with a push-bar had a glowing green Exit sign over it.

“Look there’s the exit to the alley. As soon as we’re done, make a run for it, okay? We can’t go back out through the front with the cash. They’ll catch on.” Tucker whispered, pressing a hand against Hui’s back to keep him moving, but they didn’t continue on straight, they took a sharp turn down the last hallway to their right. “I think it’s this way.”

Hui glanced back over his shoulder at the green Exit sign over the door to the alley. A part of him wondered if it was too late to bail on the plan. The exit was right there, taunting him with the way out of what could turn out to be a suicide mission. But then he thought of the money, of the satisfactory rush of adrenaline that would pulse through his veins when they had all the cash and they ran, broke free and succeeded. He was sold, and let Tucker push him toward a loose-looking panel on the wall.

“Here it is.” He pressed the toe of his shiny shoe against the bottom left corner of the panel, and the whole thing swung toward them, revealing a small antechamber to a much bigger vault. Tucker slipped inside and ran his hand over the vault door, sliding his finger around the electronic lock.

“Oh, shit.” Hui laughed, glancing back around to make sure that no one was coming. “Hurry up, Tucker. We’ve got to hurry. The fuck are you doing?” When he looked back inside the antechamber, Tucker was posing, taking a selfie with his phone. “Man, stop! We’ve got to hurry. Do you have the code?”

Tucker scoffed and jammed his phone back into his pocket. “Do I have the code, he asks. Of course I have the code, Hui!” He turned to the lock, blocking it entirely from Hui’s view, but after a few beeps and a soft whoop of success from Tucker, the vault door swung open, revealing a big pile of banded cash.

Hui reached in and grabbed a bundle, weighing it in his hands. “This is surreal. No, it’s unreal. Shit, what’s even the difference?” He laughed and tossed it up into the air. The way it felt when it dropped back into his hand, that feeling was well worth the stress of getting there. Tucker was still standing there, staring inside at all the money. Hui reached over to punch his shoulder, and said, “Stop staring and get as much as you can. We’ve got to go.”

“We can’t let you do that.” A voice growled behind them, and Hui slowly turned.

A man roughly the size of a grizzly bear stood in the doorway to the antechamber, his arms folded over his broad chest, and a few other guys stood behind him, looking like wisps compared to the size of the one in front.

One thing Hui noticed was that each of them was sporting an identical tattoo of a white dragon on their left arm. That ominous sense of trepidation that had haunted him when they first arrived suddenly flooded back. Hui dropped the wad of cash back into the safe, and he took a step away, raising his hands in surrender like he was being confronted by the police instead of six members of a Chinese gang, although, when he really thought about it, he wasn’t sure which one he should really be more intimidated by.

Two of the wispier thugs came around the big guy, and Hui surrendered himself to them, going easily as one of them gripped his arms tightly behind his back, and shoved him out of the room and along the hallway. Behind him, Hui heard Tucker putting up a fight, swearing at the guys, running himself into the walls, and at least once, one of the guys must’ve thrown him down onto the ground because Hui heard someone grunt, “Get up, kid.”

Hui closed his eyes when the guy behind him pushed him onto the floor. He didn’t want to be there anymore. Already, it wasn’t worth that rush Tucker had promised him, and Hui was at least eighty percent sure that he and Tucker were going to die there in one of the back rooms of the backroom gambling den. He thought of his father and stepmother, of his baby sister Emma. He thought about the fact that he definitely didn’t want to die that day, so he’d do whatever he could to just make it out of there alive.

And then they threw Tucker down onto the ground beside him.

Tucker was a writhing, swearing mess of a man. Before he hit the ground, he was already shouting obscenities, and when Hui opened his eyes, he saw that the whole group of men had filed into the room and shut the door behind them. He watched as they lined up a few feet from where Hui and Tucker were curled on the floor. The big grizzly bear man stood behind the other men now, his arms folded over his chest in just the right way to show off the two pistols tucked into holsters at his sides. Then he noticed that none of the other men seemed to be armed. He wondered if that meant they were equipped with other means of defense.

Hui closed his eyes and sent up a desperate prayer that he would survive this. But as Tucker continued shouting beside him, the likelihood of survival seemed to dwindle more and more.

“My dad has friends in high places. We’re an important family, and I’m white, motherfucker! You think if I go missing they won’t come looking for me? You think they won’t blame the biggest gang in the Asia town when I don’t show up? They’re gonna bring the law down on this place and it’ll be all over the news! ‘White teen with promising future gets kidnapped by dumb Chinese gang. Police sent dozens to life in prison,’ that’s gonna be the headlines.” Tucker spat towards the men standing in front of them.

Hui noticed the shift in their stances, the way the one guy who looked like the boss tightened his hand on the shining handle of his gun.

“Asshole, you’re going to get us killed,” Hui murmured out the side of his mouth. Dumb ass rich white boys always think they own the world, that they can do no wrong, and Hui may have been a dumb ass rich boy, but he was never white and he understood that the color in his skin did limit where he could go in life, that there was always someone who would treat him differently because of it. He knew that the white boys he knew didn’t have parents who told them the real way of the world. They were never taught that sometimes it is better to fall silent in the face of danger, that you can’t talk your way out of the situation by using racial slurs or trying to prove that you’re better than someone. In that instant more than ever, Hui wanted to reach over and sock Tucker upside the head. In that moment, Hui wished he’d never listened to Tucker, never even become friends with him in the first place.

The gangster closest to them had a tattoo that covered half of his face, and as he stepped closer to wrap a hand around Tucker’s throat, Hui noticed he was actually a big guy now that he stood apart from the grizzly man. “You want to say that again, kid? You want to insult us again? If you do, I promise you, those words will be the last words your tongue ever makes. I’m going to cut it out, then I’m going to kill you, and I’ll send your tongue home to your rich mommy and daddy.”

Tucker gasped for breath and his legs were spasming, his hands scrabbling at the backs of the gangster’s hand around his throat. Hui closed his eyes. He knew this was going nowhere good; Tucker was definitely dumb enough to dare to speak against the gangsters again. The man let go, and Tucker’s face went bright pink and his hands flew to his throat, running lightly over the place that was already bruising purple.

“We’re sorry,” Hui said, kneeling up in front of the men. “We’re so sorry, please, if you let us go, I swear, we’ll never come back here again.”

“You’re a cheat on top of being a thief, little asshole. Both of you are.” The big man spoke up again. Hui winced back, afraid he would be next for strangulation. “Get the fuck out,” and he spouted a string of words in another language that Hui couldn’t understand and wasn’t sure if he wanted to be able to.

Hui scrambled to his feet and reached down to pull Tucker upright too.

The grizzly bear boss man stepped forward then, and when he spoke it was in the same language as the other guy, and they went back and forth for a few minutes before turning to look at Hui and Tucker again.

Tucker seemed to have regained his strength, so Hui pushed him off to stand on his own. If they had to run or fight to be free of there, Hui didn’t want to be weighed down with Tucker; he didn’t care if that made him a shitty friend. Tucker was a shitty friend for getting him into the situation in the first place.

“If any of us ever see your faces around here again, we will kill you.”

Once again, two of the thugs came around and gripped their arms harshly behind their backs. This time, Tucker didn’t even fight back, he let the thug push him out the door and through the maze of hallways until they reached that back exit door. The gangsters shoved Hui and Tucker out into a back alley. Hui’s head slammed into a plastic trashcan, and he swore, curling up into a ball on the damp, grimy asphalt.

“Don’t ever come back around here, again, little motherfuckers.” The gangster called before he closed the door, leaving Hui with a throbbing head and Tucker with a bruised throat.

“Well,” Tucker spoke up about a minute later, his voice hoarse. “That probably could’ve gone better.”

Hui sat up, shaking his head to relieve the stars in front of his eyes and the ringing in his ears. “Yeah, it could’ve. But at least we didn’t die. I really thought that guy was going to strangle you, and I was like, shit I’m next.”

Tucker chuckled and reached up for his neck. “Yeah, I know what you mean. Hey, it didn’t work out, but look what I do have that might make us feel a little bit better.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a tiny vial full of white powder. “Let’s do it back in the car.”

So they did, and Hui felt like his world was expanding with so many possibilities because he didn’t actually die that day. He definitely could’ve but he didn’t, and he was snorting lines of coke off the dashboard of his friend’s Maserati after surviving a group of gangsters. Could life be any better? The only thing that could make the day any better would be if he could hook up with any of the girls tonight. He reached into his pocket for his phone, all he had to do was call up any girl in his phone, and he was good to go. But his pocket was empty. He searched the other one, but it was empty too.

“Shit, I must’ve dropped it in the alley.”

Tucker raised his head from the dashboard. “Dropped what?”

“My phone.” He searched the floor around his feet, and even buried his hands in his back pockets, but no luck. “It must’ve fallen out of my pockets when they threw us into the alley. Come check with me?”

Tucker rubbed at his nose. “Yeah, alright. If we die, we should die together, right? And I’ll bring my bag with us. It’s got my hairspray and, like, and that gun I bought from that guy that time we were drunk, you remember that? Let’s go.”

So they left the car with Tucker’s fancy man bag in tow.

Hui wasn’t a pussy, but walking back into that alley had his legs shaking like his bones were those flimsy pipe cleaners that kids use for arts and crafts. His hands shook like crazy, and he started wondering if maybe it was a side effect of the coke, or was he really that scared. When he heard the bang of Tucker slamming a lid down on one of the trashcans, and his heart nearly fell out of his ass, he realized that, yes, he really was just that scared.

First, he spotted his phone, grimy and cracked on the ground between two trashcans, one with a dent in the shape of Hui’s head on the side.

Second, he spotted something that made a booty call come in a distant second to what could improve his day beyond belief.

The door in the back alley was still cracked open. He nudged Tucker.

“Should we?” Tucker’s face split into a mad grin. And maybe it was the coke talking or maybe just the insane urge to finish the plan they’d started the day with, but Hui nodded.

The back hall was dark now except for the faint green light of the emergency Exit sign over the door into the alley. It didn’t take much to find their way back to the secret door to the vault, and Hui could’ve cried for joy when he noticed that the dumbass gang hadn’t even left a man or anything to guard the cash. They must’ve really trusted that they wouldn’t come back, that they would be smart enough to heed their warning, but they didn’t know Tucker or Hui because guess who’s back, motherfuckers!

The code was even still the same, and this time they wasted no time opening up the bag that Tucker had been smart enough to bring this time around, and they loaded it up with cash. Hui stood there, holding it open as Tucker shoveled in as many handfuls as would fit.

“How much do you think is in here?” Hui asked, staring down into the bag. There was more in there than he could count from a single glance, and he had to work to stifle the laugh that rose to the surface then. “Do you think there’s a million here? Two million?”

“Shit, I don’t know.” Tucker laughed, grabbing the last few stacks of cash from the vault and dropping them into the bag. “Zip it up and let’s go before they catch us again.”

Suddenly, the hallway behind them lit up with yellow light.

Unwisely, both of them froze.

A voice, hauntingly familiar since it belonged to the man with the face tattoo, echoed in through the open door. Luckily it sounded like he was far away, so Hui edged toward the door out into the hallway and peeked around. There was no sign of the man in sight. Hui turned to Tucker and shoved the bag at him. “We’ve got to run for it.”

Tucker nodded.

They were at the end of the hall, about to turn toward the exit, when Hui heard the shout behind them. He figured the grizzly man must’ve spotted them because the roar that followed the shout didn’t sound human at all.

All at once, Tucker was laughing and screaming and shouting “Fuck!” as he pushed past Hui and sprinted for the exit, running faster than Hui had ever seen him run in his life. They broke through the exit door, back into the alley, and when he heard the bull roar behind them again, Hui knew that they wouldn’t be able to make it to the car in time. Tucker had the bag over one arm, and the gangsters were catching up fast.

“Split up!”

Tucker didn’t hesitate to bolt toward the end of the alley closest to the car, so Hui ran the opposite way. He’d only taken a few long strides before the gambling den’s door busted open again, and the gangsters poured out.

He flew.

The shouts echoed off the brick walls around him, and Hui turned a corner, because of _fucking_ course the alley here wasn’t just a single straight shot alley between two streets, it was as much of a convoluted warren as the back halls of the gambling den were. Each alley split off into more alleys and Hui had no clue where he was going, but he hoped the gangsters didn’t either.

He sped around one corner, his momentum carrying him to slam his shoulder into the brick wall at the end before he took off again. He could hear street traffic just around the next corner, if he could just get there –

Two of the wispy gang members appeared at the other end, both of them out of breath, but so was Hui. He had a stitch growing in his side, and the top of his head was starting to throb again. They started toward him, and he pivoted, ready to run back the way he’d come. This particular branch of the alley extended back the other direction too.

He’d taken about two steps when three other gang members slowed before they hit the same brick wall that Hui had.

The silk of his shirt was almost definitely ruined by the sweat dripping down his back, armpits, and chest. The heat was sweltering already that day and combined with the sudden exercise and the cocaine, Hui honestly felt like the world was burning down around him. The shirt was definitely ruined.

As he doubled over with his hands on his knees, fighting to regain his breath, his heaving chest made more evident due to the fact that his shirt was starting to stick to his skin, the gang members cornered him.

“You and your little friend thought you could get away with robbing us? Right after we warned you about showing your faces around us ever again?” One of the men said. Hui looked up from his knees, but honestly, the whole world was a blur. “We said we’d fucking kill you, man.”

Hui nodded and blinked until the graffiti-covered wall across from him began to come into focus. He shook the thought from his head that whispered that he should exercise more. He looked over in the direction that the previous speaker seemed to be standing, and he smiled. “Come at me, then.”

His lips pulled into a smirk.

“Fuck –“ One of the men on his other side laughed, and that was the last thing Hui heard before a fist pounded into his stomach.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's from Hyuna's point of view. Next chapter will be Hyojong's and then I swear it'll get more interesting! As always, please leave kudos and a comment!

Before she graduated high school a year before, Hyuna was every girl’s dream. She had straight A’s, she was beautiful, she dated the most handsome guy in the school, and her future was looking up. She was popular, she had a scholarship to the University of Southern California, and she was going to become an actress. That last one was a certified fact. Everyone in the school thought so. She was the Prom Queen, the star of the school’s theater productions, and she’d been hand picked by a talent scout for an agency that managed some of the biggest names in the Hollywood acting industry.

Just like every fairytale, Hyuna’s life was looking up.

She moved to Los Angeles, she went to school, and she was sent to a few auditions that her agent promised would be perfect for an actress just starting out. Hyuna’s name wasn’t dramatic enough to get her noticed, so she changed her name to Desdemona, a horrible name from a Shakespearian tragedy that she though sounded pretty theatrical. The problem was that oddly no one wanted to cast a girl with a monstrous name like that, so none of her auditions were successes, and then the news came that her brother was sick, so she dropped the agency, left school, and went home.

She changed her name again to Desire, pronounced just like the feeling that she’d once had for a life where she would be an actress, a success, something other than a young woman working full time at her mother’s barber shop, covering all the hours her mother couldn’t because she was too busy taking care of Taeyong. She was nineteen years old, but her life had already slipped into a rut that she knew she wouldn’t be able to break out of.

Desire felt like a misfit in the city. She didn’t have any friends there anymore; they’d all moved away for school or for travel, and she was left there alone with a tired mother, an exhausted father, and a dying brother. She didn’t have a boyfriend since her popular, handsome guy broke up with her a month after graduation since he was heading to Europe for the rest of the summer and wanted all his options to be open. All she had was her job and the handsome deliveryman that came by once a month to drop off the latest shipment of hair care products sold in the shop.

And it was one day a few weeks after she would have gone back to school, that Desire was alone at the shop. It was early afternoon, most people were out on their lunch breaks and Mrs. Choi had just left after her monthly trim and root touch-up, when he arrived. The deliveryman had the face of a model, and through some careful extraction of information, Desire had found out several things about this man. His name was Elias, he was 29 years old, he was a Taurus, and he wasn’t married because serious relationships didn’t seem to stick to him. It had been a whole month since she’d last seen his face in front of the shop window, and Desire beamed like the sun was stepping through her door when Elias came inside.

A smile was already fixed on his face. “Good morning, Desire. I brought the package for you.”

His voice always went strangely deep when he said her name, and she was almost certain that it was because she called herself Desire. She watched as he ran his hand through his hair and scrubbed a hand over the beard growing like a dark shadow on his jaw. He noticed her watching.

“I could probably use a shave, hm?” He sat his clipboard on the front counter for her to sign, which she quickly did. He still had to wheel in the crate from the van parked out front. She looked back up just in time to catch his pretty eyes running down the length of her body. Her face flushed, but he didn’t seem to notice. “I could probably use a haircut too, come to think of it.”

Desire watched as he ran his hands through the bit of hair that flopped down onto his forehead. She bit her lip, and then said, “I could do all that for you, if you want.”

A smile burst onto his face. “Really? That’d be wonderful, Desire. Can you get me in tonight, by any chance?”

She glanced down at the calendar on the desk. “We’re actually all booked until closing at 7.” Elias was watching her again when she looked back up, “But maybe – I’m not actually supposed to do this, but for you, Elias – if you come by like right after closing, then I can squeeze in a trim and a shave before I have to get home.”

“That sounds great. I’ll go get the crate. I’ll be right back,” He smiled crookedly and walked out the door. Desire sighed and watched him go. When he came back in a minute later to drop off the crate, he winked and said, “See you after 7 tonight.”

Desire waved until he started his delivery van and drove away.

She didn’t have long to swoon over the opportunity of seeing Elias in a few more hours time because then Ms. Ramirez walked in the door.

An hour and a half later, in the five-minute gap between Mr. Oriol and Dr. Brown, Desire sent a text to Kim, her best friend who was currently living in Chicago with a wild social life that Desire would kill for.

“Do you remember that hot delivery guy from the shop?”

She didn’t have to wait long for Kim’s reply. “Yeah Elias or whatever? What about him?” It wasn’t as enthusiastic as Desire had been hoping for, but nevertheless she sent a long text all about his visit and how she thought he was probably into her because he was definitely giving off some interested vibes. Kim’s next response came not even a full minute later. “That’s so creepy, Hyuna. Really don’t go there. He’s too old for you and the fact that he’s hitting on you is just extra creepy. Does he even know how old you are?”

Although Desire wouldn’t ever admit it, Kim had a point. It probably was a little bit strange for a man that was almost eleven years older than her to be hitting on her when she was just barely legal. She didn’t know if he even knew her age since she had been working in the shop since she was sixteen, and even back then he’d been the same way. But she wasn’t even sure if he was flirting. Whatever it meant, Desire decided not to tell Kim about her plans for the evening. The last thing she needed was a long lecture from Kim about Elias. Maybe he really did just want a haircut and a shave, and all of this talk about flirting was completely irrelevant.

And as the long hours dragged by and shadows began to crawl across the floor of the shop, pressing up against the front window like dogs begging to be let out into the night, Desire’s thoughts kept looping around between Elias and Kim. She couldn’t shake Kim’s advice, her warning about the creepiness of a thirty year old hitting on a nineteen year old, and the more she thought about it, the more she almost wanted to cancel the appointment.

But then it was ten minute before seven and Mrs. Heather was paying Desire for the cute matching haircuts on her twin daughters. Elias would be there in ten minutes.

The bell over the door chimed when he walked inside, and Desire lifted her head from where she’d been studying her texts from Kim. She’d finally made up her mind. Elias was off limits, at least until she was older, until she knew more about herself to be confident that they had enough in common to get along.

He’d changed out of his deliveryman uniform, and he was dressed in a pair of blue jeans and a button down white shirt. He smelled like cologne when he sat down in the first chair and swiveled around to face her. “I’m ready for my close-up, Miss Desire.”

His tone sent a shiver down her spine, but she nodded. “Of course, just lean back in the chair, and I’ll shave that beard off first, okay?”

“Sounds good.” He leaned back and closed his eyes.

Up close, when she was close enough to see his pores, to see the individual strands of his eyelashes and the small striations on his lips, Desire wondered how anyone could ever fall in love with anyone else. Up close, there were all of these tiny little flaws. She could see a small, pale scar along the left side of his nose, one side of his lips was shaped different from the other, and he was wearing far too much cologne.

Desire leaned back and sucked in a breath of clear air. It’s not that she didn’t like cologne on men, just that sometimes it was better for it to be more of a light mist than an entire fucking downpour. She brushed the shaving cream onto his face, and the smell of it didn’t help to mask his cologne at all, in fact, it may have made it worse.

She was careful with the blade. Over the years, she’d gotten good at this way of shaving. First she’d practiced on her brother and Dad, then she’d tried shaving her own legs with the blade, and then at last Desire started shaving the clients if they were willing, until the current day when she was the only one in the shop to do it. The blade slid nicely over the planes of Elias’s face, and she only slightly nicked him a bit right on the curve of his jaw.

“Oh, sorry,” Desire mumbled, grabbing a tissue to dab at the spot that spit out a drop of blood. “I’m normally better at this, but it’s been a long day. Don’t worry, though, I’m almost done.”

She said those things more to reassure herself than him, but Elias hummed. But she really was almost done. And then she had to cut his hair still. Desire glanced at the clock. It was half past seven already. Her mother would be getting worried soon.

Desire figured she was done with Elias’s face, and she leaned in to make sure she got all of the other side of his face, and she felt his breath on her cheek, on her throat, on her breasts through the open gap of her shirt. She felt his hand slid up the back of her thigh.

Desire jumped back and dropped the blade.

It clattered against the floor, flinging bits of shaving cream and hair over the toes of Desire’s converse. “What the fuck?” She took another step back, and Elias sat up in the chair. He grabbed the towel she’d draped over the arm of the chair, and he wiped the shaving cream from his face. It wasn’t the cleanest shave she’d ever done, but there was no longer any places on his jaw where dark shadows clung. Now all the shadows burned in his eyes, pinning her against the vanity table.

“Stay back!” She told him, but when he took a step closer, Desire dove for the dropped blade. “I said, stay back!” She held it up in front of her with two shaking hands. Her eyes burned, and she wondered why she was so scared. Hadn’t she wanted this a few hours earlier? Hadn’t she dreamed about Elias before – whole daydreams where he kissed her and caressed her thighs? Then why did it bother her now?

“What’re you doing, Desire?” He laughed, holding one hand up in front of him. “I thought you liked me?”

Her hands shook the longer she held the blade up between them. “I never said that, Elias.” She took a step back. Her shoes squealed against the floor and her back hit the vanity. “Please, get out. I don’t want you here anymore.”

“Desire,” Elias stepped forward again, and she winced back, but there was nowhere else to go. She was cornered. “Pretty, beautiful, Desire.”

He lunged forward before she could move. One hand wrapped around both of her wrists, knocking the blade out of her hold, and his other hand went to her face, to her cheek. Elias pushed her hair out of her face, behind her ear, and he leaned in until his whole body was pressed against hers, and he whispered, “I want you. I’ve wanted you for a long time, baby.”

His lips were hot against hers and he didn’t hesitate to pry her mouth open and stick his tongue down her throat. It was horrible and she squeezed her eyes shut, squirming under his grip. After a few seconds he pulled away, and Desire took that opportunity.

“Get off of me!” She cried, struggling to break out of his hold. “Get off! Get the fuck off! Please!”

“Don’t do that!” Elias shouted, spinning Desire around so that her back hit the mirror of the vanity, and all the bottles and brushes rattled, and a few fell to the floor. The side of her shoe hit the blade, sending it spinning across the floor. “Stop fighting me, beautiful. I know you like me too, I know you want this.”

Tears spilled over Desire’s cheeks, racing down in hot rivers that Elias wiped away with his cold hands. Hands. Both of his hands.

At the same moment that she realized her hands were free, Desire realized that she had the ability to get away from him.

“Get off!” She screamed.

She shoved him away with both hands.

Everything that happened after that seemed to happen in slow motion. Everything for a long, long time after that was in slow, silent motion.

She watched as Elias slowly slipped on a clump of shaving lather on the floor, as his arms flailed through the air, searching for purchase. She watched as he fell backwards in slow, silent motion, and his head knocked into the sharp edge of the vanity beside her own vanity. She watched him fall flat to the floor, and it wasn’t until she noticed a new shadow spreading across the floor of the shop that Desire really comprehended what had happened.

Desire never realized just how close to black blood was. She didn’t realize how warm and wet it was either, not until it was smeared all over her arms and legs, coagulating under her nails, speckled on her cheek. Her hands were sticky as she wiped at the pool of blood with the same towel he’d just wiped the shaving cream off his face with. Her hands were covered in the stuff, painted so many dark shades of red, she wondered if she would ever be able to see the color again without thinking of this moment.

This moment with Elias, dead on the floor, his brain spilling out the back of his head, and her, somehow the guilty party, desperately wiping up his blood on the floor until she was covered in it.

She fell back on her heels and sobbed, wiping at her tears with the backs of her hands, probably smearing more too-black blood across her cheeks. Elias didn’t move, and his eyes stared up at the ceiling, perfectly glassy like marbles filled with pretty blue swirls.

Golden headlights swept past the windows, and Desire startled. The clock on the wall said it was inching nearer to eight o’clock. What if her mom got worried and came across town and found her like this? What if she came down here and found Elias like this? Another car rolled by on the road outside, and Desire made up her mind. She had to clean up, there was bleach in the back room and gloves, and she had to move him. He couldn’t stay there, that would only bring questions, problems that her family didn’t need at the moment. There was enough death clinging to her family with her brother’s illness.

His arm slid like a slick weight through her fingers. And he was so heavy, but she had to get rid of him. And then, she realized what she could do.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So it's been a long time since I updated this. I just found the rest of the chapters I have written for this story though, so I guess it's time I start posting again.

From the first time that Hyojong heard the word suicide he was fascinated. Before then he hadn’t known that someone could willingly end their life. Sure, he’d known that people could choose to die for, like, their country, or in defense of someone else, but actually just ending their own life because they wanted to, that was something that stuck with him. He was eleven when he first heard that word. He was twelve the first time he really considered death – not like he genuinely considered suicide, though, it was more like he thought about dying young, and the likelihood that he would.

Hyojong didn’t plan on a future. He thought for sure he’d die by the time he was seventeen. There were dark times when he thought it would be suicide. Sometimes, as the years grew darker, he thought it would probably be because of a school shooting, because those seemed to be quite prevalent, and then there were times when he thought it would be a simple thing like the flu, food poisoning, some strange and unknown disease, or a fiery car crash.

But then he turned seventeen and he was still there. Alive. Breathing and heart still beating. Part of him was overjoyed because he’d made it; he’d survived to the point he never thought he’d see. But the other part whispered that the imminent death he’d foreseen was just over the hill, coming soon.

Life was so hard to plan for when he was so sure he’d die before he made it.

Seventeen. Eighteen. Nineteen. They all passed and then he was twenty, somehow still alive. Somehow still kicking. Somehow still living without a damn clue where he was headed, and sometimes an early death still sounded like the best option. It was something his mind was always preoccupied with because nothing in his worthless life ever seemed to go right, did it? He couldn’t keep a job, a home, a fucking family.

Some nights he dreamed of drowning himself in the bathtub like he was Opthalia or whatever the fuck her name was in that one Shakespeare play. But he’d heard that drowning hurt, that you couldn’t fight the urge to open your mouth and breathe, and then the water burned like fire as it filled your lungs, and to be honest, Hyojong had never been big on pain. Pain was one of the reasons the other side of death sounded so pleasant.

Sometimes he thought of hanging himself, but then he thought that that wouldn’t be a very nice surprise for whoever found him, but sometimes he really felt like all he needed to say goodnight to the planet was a tight string wrapped around his throat. He wore chokers that sometimes pinched, and when he did pick up a girl in a club or from a party or from one of those glorious hook-up apps, he encouraged her to wrap her hands around his throat and squeeze – sometimes that scared the girls off, but sometimes they did it, pressing their small hands lightly against his neck, but it was never quite good enough. He could stare at his reflection for hours, imagining the sight of a rope around his neck, or dissociating, looking at his reflection and wondering who the fuck that person was because there was no way it could be him.

Often, he dreamt of death and immortality, and he couldn’t figure out where the second half of the dream came from. Death and eternal life were pretty much on opposite ends of the spectrum, weren’t they? And while a certain part of him longed for the calming relief of death, the rest wondered what it would be like to be granted eternal safety and security with a never-ending life, without death as a solution to all of the world’s problems. Hyojong fought a war within himself over whether he wanted death or a life that lasted until after the sun descended past the horizon one last time.

Because of the internal war he waged, and the overwhelming amount of death that draped around his mind like a veil, Hyojong numbed himself with drugs and alcohol. Days and weeks where he laid around at home in the same clothes, not showering, barely eating, and he hated every bit of it but he couldn’t get himself to get up and do anything. His mind was at war with itself, playing tug o’ war with his will to live.

Sometimes he had the absolutely crazy notion that he should go to a doctor, he should get some help, but then he’d look in the mirror or look out the window, and he’d realize that he was the only help he needed. Look in that mirror and what does he see? Himself. Only himself. Everyone’s alone in the world. That’s the way we’re born. That’s the way we die.

Get. The. Fuck. Over. It.

And he’d done this before too. Stood on the edge of the precipice. Teetered right there on the edge of death before changing his mind. Several nights when the weight of existence pressed down on his shoulders, squeezed around his chest until every breath felt like a labor, Hyojong found himself standing on the roof of his apartment building, smoking and looking out at the lights of the stars and the city and headlights racing by on the street below. He could close his eyes and imagine taking that step over the edge, the rush of wind through his hair as he plummeted to the sidewalk below, but he knew that would be too short and it wouldn’t feel at all like how he imagined flying would feel.

Sometimes he considered finding the tallest building and taking a step off of it. Then maybe he would catch enough momentum in the fall that it would turn into flight. Back when he was really young, before all the darkness of death tainted his mind, Hyojong had always dreamt of having wings of any sort – dragon wings, angel wings, and once the wings of a parrot. He’d been a fan of the story of Icarus, as well, so he thought that maybe jumping off a building to fly would be a bit like building wings of wax and soaring toward the Sun.

It would be doomed for failure.

But so was life.

Hyojong was twenty years old. He was in school, though that wasn’t fucking helping his state of mind in the slightest. He had just lost his shitty job. He was living in a rundown apartment four blocks from the community college. Life was shit, and there was one particular day in mid-August when all of his life gathered around him and took a big dump on his life, until Hyojong felt like he was buried beneath a steaming pile of –

“Shit!” He hissed as the lighter singed the tip of his thumb. It hurt now, but if his plans went right it wouldn’t matter for much longer.

Officially, it was the fourteenth attempt, which meant the Suicide Note, Vol. 14 was already folded on his desk, addressed to “Whomsoever is Concerned Enough to Have Found Me.” The radio played quietly, softly, in the background, and Hyojong rolled his last joint. The window was open to let out the smoke and a bit of the heat since his AC was broken (again), but it didn’t help much since it was almost as hot outside as it was inside.

He already felt like he was suffocating.

There was a very slight breeze that carried in the smell of baking asphalt and the McDonalds that was on the corner across from his apartment. The neighbors across the alley were shouting at each other again, and their voices carried clearly through Hyojong’s window. He thought about leaning out, shouting at them too, informing them that the rest of the world really couldn’t give a shit about their problems, and if they were so unhappy then they should probably break up.

But he didn’t care that much. The end was near, or something.

He put the joint between his lips and ruffled through the papers and books and general mess on his desk in search of the lighter he’d just dropped a moment before. God help whoever had to go through all his things afterwards. There was absolutely no organization; his desk was like an ocean of papers and notebooks and textbooks from classes he didn’t really give a damn about. Come to think of it, he should probably put the note somewhere more visible, somewhere with less of a mess so they’d be able to find it in a timely manner after finding him.

Hyojong looked around, searching for even a single clear spot of floor or furniture.

Nothing.

Oh, well. He figured they’d find it eventually if he just left it on his desk.

He felt himself relaxing as he sat there at his desk, listening to the background music of the radio, the city, the arguing couple, and he blew half-assed smoke rings out the window. The radio switched to a commercial for some kind of drink, a new lemon-lime soda, and suddenly Hyojong was thirsty, and he really wanted to go down to the shop down the block and buy a soda, but what about the plan?

He did still need a plastic bag.

The walk to the shop was short but bright and clear. Hyojong smiled at the man working at the cash register, and he shuffled to the back of the shop where the freezers were, and he pulled out the first soda he grabbed. And then he saw a bag of chips that looked pretty good, and a few bars of candy, and by the time that he got up to the counter, he was holding a half dozen things.

“Hungry, son?” The man rang everything up, and Hyojong was almost positive that the guy had to know that he was high. “That’ll be ten dollars, please. Thank you. Have a nice day.”

“Whatever’s left of it.” Hyojong replied, and then he grabbed his plastic bag and left.

He didn’t even eat all the candy before he did it. He didn’t even open the bag of chips. He did drink half the bottle of the soda before deciding that it was too sugary and he didn’t want the rest. He shoved the candy bars into his pockets, left the chips on the desk, and then he picked up the plastic grocery bag they’d all come home in.

It was such a strange thing, Hyojong decided, that someone could choose when to die. At what point in their life, their reasons, their exact moment and way of leaving.

Hyojong pulled the bag down over his head, grabbed the roll of tape from the desk, and began wrapping it tight around his throat. Not tight enough that he wouldn’t be able to breath, just tight enough that the carbon dioxide wouldn’t be able to escape. He twisted the tape around his neck, and listened to the radio, still playing softly in the corner of his room. It was late afternoon by that point, and the DJ had switched so now it was that one annoying guy that came on the afternoons that Hyojong really couldn’t stand, and didn’t that just fucking suck? He was going to die and the last thing he was going to hear was himself struggling for breath and that fucking DJ telling another lame ass joke about the heat or the traffic or something that his sister’s kid did _again._

It was already growing stuffy inside the bag, and the heat inside the room was quite unbearable and – God dammit! – the DJ started in with one of his stories.

“The weather’s really something today, isn’t it? I was on my way to work today, I’d just left my sister’s house because it was my niece’s birthday, right. And the traffic – it’s so horrible today! But I was on my way to the station and – “

Hyojong couldn’t stand it, the air trapped in the bag tasted wrong and was too hot and he couldn’t breathe (never mind that that was the whole point of wrapping the bag around his head), so he tore the bag open, ripped a hole in the plastic right over his mouth, and the bag flooded with nice, breathable, surprisingly refreshing air. He gasped for breath. He could taste the whole world on the air – the smoke of the neighbor that was barbecuing on the back patio of the building, the perfume of the flowers in his next-door neighbor’s window box, and the smell of clean air in the middle of the city.

The sky outside his window was fading fast to gold, and the DJ started playing a new song, one that Hyojong had never heard before.

Hyojong tore the bag away until it fell around his neck like a necklace, and then he tore at it some more until the tape gave way. He pitched it toward the trash.

The atmosphere was ruined and he couldn’t do it anymore. It was no longer the time or place to kill himself, and Hyojong sat there on the edge of his bed, drenched in sweat because when the fuck had he decided it was a good idea to be wearing an overlarge ? He sat there in the quiet, and he listened to the new song on the radio, and it was beautiful, and he listened to the whole thing and then the DJ played another new song, somehow better than the last one.

Hyojong stood up, he kicked a pile of clothes angrily across his room, and he turned the radio off and threw it in the trashcan because why could everything be good now? Why wasn’t it good before he’d unsuccessfully attempted to suffocate himself? Why did everything good have to happen right after?

He was angry, whether it was at himself or the radio, the universe or the powers that be, he didn’t know. Whatever the reason, he opened the door to his apartment, walked out, and didn’t look back.

The night was golden and hot, and he walked up the block, then another and another. He never wanted to stop going.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promise the next chapter will be more interesting now that I've basically got their backstories all done. Please leave comments and/or kudos, they seriously keep me motivated to write more!


	4. Chapter 4

Hui wasn’t sure why the Chinese gang decided to let him live. Maybe they didn’t realize that he was still breathing when they left him slumped over against a wall in the alley after brutally punching and kicking him until he slipped out of consciousness. Either way, he was still alive and breathing. He limped his way out of the alley and caught a cab back to Tucker’s parents’ place.

He was glad when he climbed out of the car and saw the lights on in Tucker’s pool house. His friend was alive too by some other miracle.

When Hui pushed in the door, ready to strip out of his destroyed silk shirt and muddy and bloody pants, Tucker shouted in surprise and jumped to his feet, waving a gun around even though Hui was almost completely certain that Tucker had no clue how to use a gun. He held his hands up in surrender anyway as he sunk down onto the cushions.

“It’s just me. Fuck, man. I think I’m dying.” Hui laid back into the pillows and closed his eyes. His entire body ached. His nose was possibly broken, or at least it had bled a lot, his lip was busted open, his ribs ached when he breathed, and there was already a bruise the size of China blossoming on his thigh. He was only mildly concerned that maybe he had some internal bleeding, but he wasn’t likely to go to the hospital. Not at that moment anyway. First he wanted to see their hard-earned money.

Tucker paled when Hui asked.

“There’s a little bit of a hitch with that, Hui.” He tucked the gun into his waistband and sat down on the other end of the sofa.

“They were chasing me, man, so I ditched the suitcase in the trunk of this white Toyota that was up the street. The trunk was open a little bit, so I threw it in and rolled under the car really fast before the guys could find me.” Tucker ran a hand over his hair. It was still gelled perfectly into place. “They ran right by the car, but when I rolled back out, the trunk was shut and locked. I couldn’t break into it, I don’t know how, and then I saw some people coming. So I – I took a picture of the car and the license plate, and it’s lucky I did because the girls were the owners of the car, and then they left. But we have the license plate, so we can go find it again.”

Hui dropped his head down into his hands. At that moment, the darkness within his palms was happily all that existed in his universe. If he just focused on the darkness of his hands then he could pretend that he had no other problems in his world. There was no gangsters that knew their faces, no cash locked away in someone else’s car, no possibility that everything they’d gone through that day was a waste. But he couldn’t live with his face in his hands, ignoring the rest of the world around him.

“You really fucked up, Tuck.” He finally mumbled and pulled his face out of his hands. Tucker was sitting on the opposite end of the sofa. The ring of bruising around his throat probably wouldn’t fade for a while, and the scrapes on his cheek wouldn’t scar so his perfectly innocent face would return to being that way soon.

Hui touched the tip of his tongue to his own split lip. It stung. He hissed and leaned his head back against the sofa.

“We have to get that money back somehow. You promised me I’d get a rush from what we went through today, but honestly, no such luck, unless we’re talking the literal rush to get the fuck away from that place.”

Tucker laughed, and Hui couldn’t help but laugh too. The day had been long, and he’d exerted himself far too much. Maybe there had been a bit of pleasure when he was running for his life away from the gangsters, and the rush of fear when they had him cornered, when he thought they were for sure going to shoot him and be done with him, that rush of fear had felt pretty good too. All that being said, having all that cash in hand would really make the day feel worth it.

“You know, I think I’ve got a plan.”

Hui’s friend Kailee was a hacker, skilled in the art of hacking into police traffic cameras to scan for certain license plates. Kailee wasn’t wary about helping a friend, no matter how sketchy the need was. So when Hui called her up at fifteen minutes before eight that night to ask her a favor, Kailee was quick to assure Hui that she’d do whatever she could, so Hui fed her the license plate number off of Tucker’s phone.

Ten minutes later, they had an address.

Hui didn’t have time to shower or change out of his messy clothes. He only had enough time to wipe the blood off of his face, and then he and Tucker set out for the address where their money was parked.

The club where the car was parked had played host to many of Hui’s richest fantastical nights. The guard at the entrance to the parking garage recognized him and waved Tucker’s car inside, and two minutes later, Tucker pulled into the open spot next to a familiar Toyota.

It wasn’t much of a car – Hui would never have thought that there would be somewhere near a million dollars hiding in that car’s trunk. But there was, which made it the perfect hiding spot if they could get the cash back out. He ran his fingers over the trunk and knew that there was no way that they’d be getting their bag of money out unless they actually broke into the car, which would likely set off the alarm, not to mention it would be extremely noticeable by the owner when she came out of the club.

“Won’t it be quicker if we just go steal the keys from the girls?” Hui wondered aloud. “Then we can return them, and they’ll never know that someone broke into their trunk. It’s not like we’ll look out of place at this club, and you know what they look like, right, Tuck? So it shouldn’t be any problem at all.”

The parking garage reeked of oil and old cigarettes. Somewhere in the maze of layers, a car’s tires squealed against the pavement and a door slammed. Tucker stood on the other side of the car, peering through the driver’s side window like he was honestly thinking about busting in the window. He thumped his hand against the glass and looked up at Hui.

“You just want to go inside because you love this fucking place.”

Tucker’s accusation wasn’t wrong, but Hui wasn’t going to tell him that. He began thinking of another way to rephrase the request when Tucker swore loudly and jumped over the hood of the car, sliding into a crouch on the ground beside Hui. On instinct, Hui sunk down to a crouch as well. “What’s your fucking problem?”

“It’s those Chinese guys again,” Tucker wrapped his arm around Hui’s neck, practically strangling him. The stench of Tucker’s sweat and blood filled Hui’s nose and he pulled away from his friend. They were both a mess, but Hui thought that if they were lucky, the dim lighting in the club would mask a bit of the blood stains on his pants and the sleeves of his shirt. They needed to get into the club.

“How did they find us?” Tucker hissed, peeking up over the hood of the car again.

Hui pinched his arm. “It doesn’t matter. They might not be here for us. What does matter is that we get inside the club. Let’s go.”

It was a mad sprint from the side of the car to the silver doors of the elevator on the corner. The seven or eight members of the gang were at the opposite end of the lane, so by the time that Hui and Tucker were slipping inside the elevator, and the doors were securely shut, the dangerous men on the other side of the doors were nowhere near them. Hui was even pretty sure that they hadn’t even noticed the two of them.

As soon as they stepped foot inside the club, Hui regretted it. He no longer wanted to be there even if every element of the club called out to his blood, tempting him into a bathroom to do another line of coke, or to one of the back halls to find a pretty girl to make moan. All the lights and the sounds and smells combined to send Hui’s head spinning. Nausea swelled in his stomach, and he felt like the floor was rolling beneath him. He gripped onto Tucker’s shoulder for support, but the other man didn’t even notice.

Tucker stretched up to look over all the heads on the crowd. “I see the girls. They’re at the bar.”

Hui pitched forward. His leg was giving out on him at last, and the place that he knew was bruised felt like it was on fire. “Can we sit down somewhere?”

When they settled down in a dark corner, and Hui rested his face in his hands on a table, the world slowly began to settle and come into focus again. Tucker was staring at him, pale and worried, but when Hui blinked and sat up straight again, he started babbling.

“They’re at the bar, and I think one of us should go chat them up, maybe buy them a drink, and when they’re not looking, steal the driver’s keys from her purse. Sounds good right?” Tucker tapped his nails on the table, and glanced back over his shoulder in the direction of the bar, out of sight.

“Let me do it.” Hui started to rise from the chair, but the world started to waver.

“No offense, but I don’t think so. For one, you look like you’ve got sea legs right now. And for another, your face is all busted up, man. I know you think you’re pretty but right now you’re the most shit-faced looking motherfucker in this club. Do you really think those girls are going to look twice at you?” Tucker leaned back and smirked.

The only imperfection on his face was his face. Tucker wasn’t good looking, not by Hui’s standards anyway, but he knew that the other guy had a point. With a busted lip and a bruised nose, no girl in her right mind would want him chatting her up at the bar; Tucker’s bruises were only around his throat, hidden by the collar of his shirt. And the world wasn’t as shaky as it had been before, but Hui didn’t want to take any risks. He nodded and waved in the girls’ direction. “Go get ‘em, tiger.”

Tucker disappeared from the table, and Hui sighed, sinking back into the shadows that the corner provided him with. He couldn’t see the bar from there or the entrance of the club, all he could see was the stage where a punk ass DJ with blond dreadlocks was bouncing up and down, shouting indecipherable words into a microphone. Hui’s head throbbed. The sooner they got the money, the better. He felt like he could drop dead any second.

About thirty minutes passed, and Hui was just starting to drift into a peaceful place where all of his aches and pains earned throughout the day were fading.

Then Tucker dropped back down into the seat across from Hui, and he opened his eyes, letting the world and his pain flood back in. Tucker looked like more of a mess than he had before as he said, “Shit, man, they’re here too. They’ve got to be after us.” He reeked of sweat and smoke and a woman’s perfume.

Hui closed his eyes as the throbbing at the top of his head intensified. He’d be lucky if he escaped the day without serious permanent damage to his person. Already his ribs felt so bruised that each breath felt like he was being crushed, and when he tried to speak, his lips felt like they were being split open all over again.

He licked his bottom lip even as he thought that, and he tasted iron. The Chinese had really done a number on him, and when he glanced up from the table, he saw that Tucker was right. The same men from earlier in the day were weaving through the crowd.

“I’m not getting anywhere with those girls,” Tucker leaned in closer so that Hui could hear him clearly over the music. “Maybe we should just go back out there and break in to the car. I know you’ve called me a crazy motherfucker in the past, but even I’m not crazy enough to risk the mafia over there catching me in here.”

“Can you not do anything right, Tuck? Shit, you’re the one who planned all this in the first place. Why do I have to make everything right?” Hui stood up from his seat, swaying slightly on his injured leg. “Which ones are the girls?”

“Blonde with braids and a crazy hot red head at the far end of the bar.” Tucker stretched up on his toes. “You’d better hurry. Those guys are almost over here.”

Hui looked in the same direction as Tucker. The gang members were peering into curtained booths, shoving people out of their way. They were clearly looking for something. Or someone. He nodded. “I’ll be quick.”

He squeezed through the crowd, using the heat and press of their bodies to keep him stable. When he finally crashed into the bar, practically pinned into place by the throng of strangers at his back, Hui waved the bartender over. “Get me a water, please.” He needed something in his hands, something to steady him, and as much as he wanted at least one drop of liquor in his veins, at the moment with the nausea threatening to rise up in him again, alcohol didn’t sound like the best option.

A glass of water appeared on the counter in front of him, and the bartender winked as she said, “It’s on the house.” And Hui wasn’t sure if she was actually flirting with him over a glass of water, or if she was just so used to flirting with patrons that she couldn’t shake the habit, but either way he took the glass and pressed it to his lips.

The ice-cold water worked like a fucking marvel. The nausea disappeared and he pressed the empty glass to his cheek, letting the cold work through his skin, spreading like fingers through his nerves and bones like a pain reliever until the pulsing pain at the crown of his head even faded to a tolerable level.

She reappeared and filled his glass with more water. Hui didn’t wait a second longer for her to flirt with him again. He plunged into the crowd, squeezing along the bar until he got to the end where he saw a pretty blonde girl with braids that twisted in intricate patterns all over her head, tumbling down over her shoulders. A lovely red head sat beside her, sipping at some pink cocktail through a straw, and neither one of them was looking anywhere else than right at each other.

Suddenly Tucker’s complete inability to woo them made perfect sense.

Lesbians.

The red head leaned in to whisper in the other girl’s ear, and then she leaned in for a kiss, which made the blonde blush and push her away. As the blonde moved around, Hui caught a glimpse of silver just on the other side of her, sitting right beside her purse. Keys.

_Tucker, you absolute asshole._ Hui shook his head with a mad grin.

He stumbled toward the girls, and when he was close enough, he threw himself at them. He wrapped an arm around each of them, “accidentally” spilling his glass of water down the front of the red head as he slurred something that probably sounded like he was propositioning them. As both of them turned to dry up the mess of water poured onto Red’s lap, Hui reached carefully around the blonde’s shoulders, and snagged her keys from the bar, slipping his hand up the ruined sleeve of his shirt.

He backed away and vanished into the crowd.

Halfway back to Tucker, the crowd parted just enough that Hui could see toward his destination, and he froze in the middle of the crowd. Six bulky men stood around the table in the corner, and Tucker’s pale face was just a sliver between their shapes. Hui turned and shot like a bullet toward the exit.

Hui didn’t feel any remorse.

Tucker was an asshole most of the time and it was his fault that Hui was in this whole situation. Let the mafia deal with him. Or the police, whoever got to him first. Maybe the girls would put the blame on him for stealing their car since he’d been acting weird around them for the whole night. Whatever Tucker’s future held, it didn’t matter to Hui. He was out of there, and the front seat of that shitty car felt like a throne as he pulled out of the parking garage.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again, thanks for reading! I would love your comments please, they really help convince me to keep posting more.


	5. Chapter 5

Desire’s hands shook and the lining of her throat and nose felt rubbed raw, both from vomiting several times in the shop’s toilet, and also from scrubbing the floor and the edge of the vanity with bleach.

She wasn’t sure what she was doing.

As a kid, she used to obsessively watch crime shows. CSI, Law and Order, all those kind of shows were all that she watched from the age of ten until she was about fifteen. Back then, she’d watched those shows and thought that if she ever committed a crime, especially a murder, then she would be smarter than any of the dumb suspects in the shows. She would get rid of all the evidence, hide the body well, or she would know how not to commit the crime in the first place. Watching those shows wasn’t like a way of planning for the future or anything, but when she sat there on the floor of her mother’s barber shop, her client’s blood all over her hands and legs, Desire’s memories of those shows came flooding back.

While part of her wondered if this was truly murder – what was the difference between murder and involuntary manslaughter; between involuntary manslaughter and self-defense? – she couldn’t get rid of the voice in the back of her head that told her to call the cops. Covering up the fact that a man was dead always made the penalties worse, didn’t it? But if she turned herself in tonight, without cleaning up all the mess, without acting like she wasn’t about to hide him away, would she still go to prison for killing him, or would she be told that it was self-defense and she was right to do it? Or would the officers and her family and the whole world look at Desire and see a girl whose name wasn’t so different from a prostitute’s? A woman who dressed in a short skirt and a tight shirt? A woman who invited a man into her shop after hours? Would the world look at her and see a girl who was asking for it, who shouldn’t have reacted so violently when a man touched her?

They would call her a murderer. She was sure of it.

Elias’s delivery van was still parked out front of the shop, and Desire knew that his van was the best place to put the body.

She pulled on gloves before she casually walked out to the van and opened the back doors. The shows always talked about fingerprints. She checked the sidewalk in front of the shop, and all the way up and down, it was empty, and for once she was relieved that after dark that part of the city always seemed to fall dormant. There was no one there to witness her dragging the body out the front of the store, and somehow heaving it into the back of the van with a plastic bag over the back of its head to keep the blood from dripping everywhere.

There was no one to witness her shutting the doors of the van and the store, locking herself inside to clean up all the blood.

She felt like she was breathing bleach, as she soaked the floor with the stuff, and as she wiped down the vanity beside hers, careful to make sure that there were no dark specks of blood anywhere. After she cleaned up all the blood, she soaked all the towels in bleach in the back room. It was standard procedure to bleach the towels, and then to wash them at the end of each day, so after they were bleached, she threw them in the washing machine and started it. She puked in the bathroom, washed her hands, and tied her hair up securely on top of her head, fixing a hair net over the top. Somehow in those shows, people always got caught when a piece of their hair was found at the crime scene, and Desire wasn’t dumb enough to leave a piece of her hair on the driver’s seat of the van.

As she left the shop, Desire couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something she’d forgotten, but she started the delivery van and pulled away from her mother’s shop anyway. She was running on autopilot, and she was halfway home before she realized that she couldn’t go home with the body, and she was in the middle of downtown and there were plenty of alleys to park a van in.

Each task and each solution came one at a time. Breathe in. Breathe out. Think of nothing else. Don’t think of the dead body in the back seat. Don’t think –

She pulled off in an alley.

The city seemed to be silent around her, as if the whole place was holding its breath, waiting to see what she would do. Desire shut off the van, threw the keys into the backseat, and she grabbed the bag from off of the body’s head. She climbed from the van, and took the hair net off, slipped the gloves from her hands, and she ran from the alley, ran down the streets and more alleys until she was so twisted around she had no clue where in the city she was. She threw the hair net and gloves and the bag into a garbage bin on the street, she let her hair fall loose around her shoulders.

Desire was sure her eyes were wide with horror. Her arms and legs were still stained with blood though a lot of it had come off when she’d been in the bathroom. She twisted down streets and alleys, and her mind was going in circles.

How could she go home? Could she _ever_ go home? Her parents would know. When the police find the body, they’ll know it was her, a girl named Desire killed the man who wanted her. Everyone will know it was her, and she can’t go home, not if she ever wants to live her life free from prison.

The clocktower of a nearby church chimed the hour, and Desire felt panic flare through her because it was already ten o’clock, and she should have been home at least two hours ago. Her mother must have been worried, so worried.

Her phone wasn’t in her pocket when she reached for it.

Her purse wasn’t on her shoulder, which meant she didn’t have the keys to her car either. Everything she brought with her to the shop was still there.

_Maybe they’ll think I’ve gone missing._ Desire passed through another dark alley, and the street ahead of her was lit with red and orange and green light. Headlights flickered by, and she thought again of the sight of headlights on the shop window, headlights casting shadows through a pool of nearly black blood.

And then she stepped off the curb, the toes of her shoes scuffing against the pavement, worn smooth by thousands and thousands of cars. And headlights lit up the side of her body, glaring across her eyes, yet Desire stared forward, braced for impact.

But impact never came.

Desire’s world shrunk to include four things: the cool touch of night air against her cheeks and her hair and the blood on her skin; a feeling like electricity that buzzed almost numbingly below her skin; the heat of a car’s engine and headlights burning over the side of her face and her legs; the screech of tires as a white Toyota slammed on its brakes to stop half a foot away from her.

Slowly she turned to look.

The boy behind the wheel looked back.

He seemed to be just as surprised as she was. For a moment, all they did was stare at each other. His face was bloody, and Desire was horrified to think that she’d done that – it was her fault he’d stepped on the brakes and he must’ve slammed his face into the steering wheel, that was the only logical explanation for him to have a bruised nose and a busted lip that now bubbled bright red blood. She’d nearly killed another man tonight.

She sunk down onto the ground and lowered her head to the asphalt of the street; it burned against her forehead, still warm from a long day of sunlight.

The street was silent except the soft rumbling of the car’s engine and a startling shriek as a car door opened. The driver stepped out, unfolding like an immense angel from the Bible stories her mother used to tell her. His head seemed to disappear up into the sky, crowned in stars and sparse clouds.

Desire turned her head to the side to look up at him.

The golden headlights haloed him, but she could still make out the lines of his face, stains on his shirt and pants. Maybe he was a fallen angel, she thought. He was beautiful, he was large enough to fill the whole sky. She blinked up at him without saying a word.

He knelt down beside her, and when he spoke, she thought it sounded like a prayer, like there was a pattern or melody behind his words.

“Hey,” he grabbed her shoulders and dragged her upright, and the spell broke.

The melodic prayer was spilling through the open door of the car, coming from the radio. He shrunk down to the size of a human when he brought her eye to eye with him. He was no angel.

“I asked, are you okay?”

Up close, she saw that he was imperfect. Other than the busted and bruised nature of parts of his face, one of his eyelids was slightly droopier than the other. His hair was clearly dyed blond and it was a matted mess, like he’d been sweating all day and running his hands through it, but hadn’t thought to run a comb over it or take a shower.

“I’m fine,” Desire mumbled, trying to hide her hands in the hem of her shirt. She knew they were still stained with blood, and she hoped that this boy didn’t see that.

“Let me take you home. No offense, but you don’t look in the right state of mind to be wandering the streets.” The boy stood and offered a bruised and bloody hand down to help her up. In the back of her mind, her thoughts sang again of a fallen angel, and she wondered what trials he’d been put through to be placed there in front of her, to be sent to rescue a murderer from her path of destruction. She took his hand and let him pull her to her feet. “You do have a place to go home to, don’t you?”

When Desire shook her head – she couldn’t go home; she knew that, and this boy in a white chariot seemed to be a sign to support that – the guy’s face settled into a crooked grin.

“That makes two of us.”

He walked back to the door of his car, and Desire let her gaze follow, but her feet stayed firmly rooted to the asphalt where she’d fallen. He looked back at her once he reached the door, and he leaned against it, still grinning like he was crazy, and he said, “I’ve got no plans and a road that leads to everywhere. You’re more than welcome to come along, if you want?”

Desire hesitated for a moment. She didn’t know this guy at all, but she couldn’t go back to anyone that she did know.

As a car racing up the street toward them backlit this fallen angel of a man, briefly restoring his halo, Desire nodded.

“That sounds like fun.”

Climbing into the passenger seat of the Toyota, she felt like there was a tether that had been attached to her back her whole life, but in that instant as she settled into the soft cloth and buckled the seatbelt across her torso, the tether snapped. For the first time in her life, Desire was free.


	6. Chapter 6

She didn’t speak at all, so he let the garbage music from the radio fill the silence as he kept his eyes on the road while still watching her out of the corner of his eye. Every few minutes she would shudder in her seat and turn to look out the window. Hui was pretty sure that she was crying, but he wasn’t about to say anything. As familiar as he may have been with the anatomy of a woman, he didn’t know how to deal with their emotions other than happiness and horniness. This girl was definitely neither one of those.

When they were stopped at a light, he noticed a streak of dried blood on her knee and another on her thigh. The light turned green, and Hui drove off, but still he scanned the strange girl in the seat beside him, checking her for more bloody spots. He didn’t think she’d fallen to the ground back there hard enough to break the skin, so it took him a minute to realize that she had blood staining her fingers and the backs of her hands, there was a smear of it on her arm by her elbow.

She shuddered again, and this time a sound like a sob echoed over the music.

She was really covered in blood that had been hastily wiped off, which only smeared it around. Hui glanced away from the road to look her up and down, and then he reached for the clump of napkins that was stuffed in the cupholders on the center console.

He didn’t look as he offered them to the girl, and she didn’t even mumble a ‘thank you’ as she took them. She scrubbed her arms and legs, and although Hui wasn’t watching her anymore, he still heard the hitches in her breath as she wiped away the biggest blood spots. Part of him wanted to speak, wanted to ask her questions and get some answers. What was her name? Why was she wandering like a lost child around the city? And most important of all: why was she covered in blood?

But he didn’t ask at all.

Radio sounds filled the silence, and thoughts looped around Hui’s head until he thought he was going mad. All the moments of his day from start to finish – the gambling den, the gangsters, the feel of a bag of cash weighing down his hands, and the flash of panic and wonder when he was cornered in that alley and thought he was going to die, and going to that club to regain the cash, nearly killing that damn girl in the seat beside him.

He looked over at her again.

She was something. Beautiful. Pretty. Wasted. Hollow.

Silky sheets of dyed-red hair poured down her shoulders, knotted in places probably due to her state of mind, and there were a few sections that appeared bright orange among the reddish color of the rest of her hair. Her eyes were a soft brown, so light that Hui swore they were almost gold when a pair of headlights flashed by them, but they were hollow eyes, drained of passion and life.

That hollowness echoed inside himself as well, but he’d learned to wear a mask long ago, to fill the hollow spaces inside of him with drugs and drinking and clubs and girls. But tonight he was bled dry. He stared ahead at the streets on the edge of town, dyed orange and covered in black cracks, discarded garbage.

Shadows lingered in the burnt orange proximity of buildings and cars. Some of them shouted things as they drove passed, and Hui saw the girl in the passenger seat wince, curl her legs up onto the seat in front of her, and she pressed her forehead to her knees. And they were almost out of town, almost away from all of their unspoken problems. Hui could see an empty intersection drawing up in front of them, and the dark shape of a bridge just beyond, and then they’d be gone. So gone.

For the second time that night, something white and unexpected stepped out in front of Hui’s car, and this time he didn’t have time to step on the brakes before the collision. The back end of the car spun out and Hui knew that he’d just left his mark on the road, two black lines squiggling toward the intersection. But he hoped to the God he struggled to believe in that the boy he’d just hit wasn’t leaving his mark on the road.

He swore and slammed his fist into the steering wheel. The horn echoed loudly through the empty street, and in the passenger seat, the girl let out a real, heavy sob.

“No,” she choked out. Hui looked over at her and saw that her cheeks were running with tears and she was staring out through the windshield at the body of the boy Hui had just hit. “No, not again.”

Something in her tone snapped at something inside of him, electrified him into motion. Anger swelled inside of him, and Hui all but kicked his way out of the door and threw himself out of the car, charging toward the collapsed shape in the middle of the street. To his surprise and delight and anger, the boy seemed to be moving.

The white shape pushed himself up onto his knees and threw his head back. His laughter filled the night and rang off the buildings and Hui charged toward him just as the boy stood up to his full height. He was a skinny twig of a man, a pale ghost rising up off the street like mist in the early morning, but unlike intangible mist, the boy was solid flesh and bone when Hui’s fist connected to the side of his face. And when he fell to the ground, Hui fell with him. He hit one side of his face and then the other, and again and again, and the pale boy was laughing through the blood.

Hui would have continued to hit him, but the girl appeared out of nowhere and she grabbed the arm he’d pulled back to punch the kid again. Her fingers were small and cool, slender and strong as they wrapped around Hui’s wrist and stopped him.

“Don’t. Stop hitting him!”

Below him, the kid collapsed back onto the ground, still giggling half-heartedly through the blood that trickled down his chin. “You’ve got a wicked right hook on you, buddy, but I’m amazed you didn’t knock any teeth out.” He grinned up at Hui and the girl, and ran his tongue over his front teeth, poked it obscenely into his cheeks on either side as if to check that all of his molars were there. He leaned over to the side and spat out a mouthful of blood onto the asphalt.

Hui jumped up and backed away, flexing his fingers. The skin pulled tight over his knuckles, a new, fresh ache to join the rest of his body. The throbbing pain at the crown of his head was back again, and his ribs still felt like every breath would be his last. The girl’s hand burned like ice on his wrist, and he turned to look at her. She was looking at the boy on the ground as if she’d never seen someone look like him before.

He had platinum blond hair grown down past his ears, which Hui wanted to tell him was out of fashion, since it wasn’t the 1990s anymore, and his face was small, round, cheeks hollowed out like he’d not eaten properly in weeks. Dark circles contrasted with his bright black eyes. To Hui, the boy looked normal if not below average, but the girl didn’t seem to be able to draw her eyes away from him.

“Are you alright?” She asked, and Hui had only heard her speak like twice, but he was certain that the wavering tone wasn’t normal. “Why did you step out in front of us?”

The guy sat up, resting back on his hands, and he looked up at them as he spat out another mouthful of blood. “Maybe your boyfriend’s just a shitty driver.” He flipped his hair out of his face.

Hui felt the heat of anger flash through him again before the girl’s hand squeezed his wrist. He fell back to her side even as she said, “He’s not my boyfriend.”

“Then maybe he’s just a shitty driver.”

This time the girl didn’t hold him back as he stepped forward to punch the kid again, but he was faster than Hui, and he sprang to his feet and started whirling and running down the street, his shirt flapping loosely around him like a dirty, broken pair of wings. He howled and laughed and stumbled around like he was drunk or high. Maybe he was. That would explain his strange response to Hui hitting him.

As they stood there in the empty street, bathed in orange street lamps and the golden light coming from the car, Hui folded his arms across his chest and watched.

The same hollowness he saw in himself and in the pretty girl at his side, he saw in that strange boy dancing down the middle of the road back toward them. He wasn’t sure if that hollowness was what caused him to do it or if it was something else, but when the boy was just a few feet away, Hui called out, “If you don’t have anything planned, you can come with us.”

Everyone froze; the boy stopped moving and laughing, and the girl turned slowly to face Hui. Even the sounds on the side streets and the stars seemed to stop.

“What?”

The boy took a few stumbled steps towards Hui and he felt the overwhelming urge to reach forward and just poke at the kid’s shoulder with one finger, just to see if he would tip over backwards. He restrained himself. Just barely. “We’re headed nowhere but away from here. You can come with us.”

Part of Hui shouted and punched himself, screamed “What’s wrong with you, motherfucker? These are strangers! Perfect strangers, and you’re inviting them to run away with you on this criminal roadtrip in your stolen car? What the hell are you thinking, Hui?” The rest of him hummed and buzzed with an intense feeling; all of this, this whole night, felt right like as long as he didn’t stop for a moment, nothing bad would happen to him or that girl or this new strange boy.

And when the three of them climbed back into the idling white Toyota – Hui in the driver’s seat, the girl beside him, and the new kid quickly passed out in the back – they didn’t stop again until the glittering city of glamor and death vanished from the rearview mirror, swallowed whole by the horizon.


	7. Chapter 7

Hyojong felt like he’d swallowed a cotton field when he woke up. His mouth was drier than hell combined with a fucking desert. His stomach growled, his head throbbed, and the entire world seemed to be vibrating around him. The radio was playing and it was another one of those horrible pop songs that’s always on the radio no matter what time of day or what station you’re listening to.

He groaned and reached up to wrap his pillow around his ears to block out the sound, or maybe to pull it out to throw at the radio.

But his hands came into contact with a flat, vibrating soft cloth. And then he realized that his feet were pressed against something hard that was also vibrating. And then he realized that the world vibrating around him was not in fact a product of the drugs and alcohol he’d consumed the night before. He was in the backseat of a car.

Probably faster than he should’ve, Hyojong sat up. The world was bright and it swung around him as his temples felt like a hurricane was all that existed between them. He only barely had time to say, “I think I’m gonna be sick,” before he was scrambling for the window, which rolled down just in time.

Just to let you know, vomiting out the window of a moving car that’s flying along at speeds anywhere between the fifty to seventy-five mark is not a great idea unless you’re trying to see how vomit looks when it’s flying. Maybe when Hyojong was fifteen that’s an experiment he would have liked to see, but at twenty years old, it just made him feel even worse about himself.

After a minute he sank back inside the car, rolled the window up and pressed his cheek against the cool surface of it, and closed his eyes again. The vibrating of the window and the door shifted, and he realized that the car was slowing.

He groaned again.

“Please, do not puke in this car again,” drawled a man’s voice from the front seat.

Hyojong cracked open his eyes.

A pretty red-haired girl was peering around at him, her pale face stuck between the two front seats, and she held out a water bottle to him. He graciously accepted it, nearly spilling it all down the front of himself as he sucked it dry in seconds. He crumpled it and tossed to the other side of the backseat. “Thanks.”

The car rocked to a stop on the shoulder, and a man’s face – really, more like a boy since Hyojong didn’t think the guy could be that much older than him – joined the girl. There was something familiar about him.

Memories of the night before returned. The failed suicide. The smoke-filled apartment of Joaquin, the neighborhood’s most notorious drug dealer. The second suicide attempt that ended with him flying briefly through the air, getting assaulted, the offer of a stranger to go nowhere, and finally taking a long nap in the very car he’d tried to kill himself by stepping in front of. What were the odds?

They both stared at him as if he were an alien.

“What?”

“We’re just a little bit amazed that you’re actually alive, if I’m being honest.” The guy said, turning around in the driver’s seat again. “I did hit you with my car, and you passed out pretty fast back there. She was wondering if maybe you had internal bleeding.”

Hyojong laughed. “I’m feeling a bit sore, yeah, but I don’t think I have any blood where it’s not supposed to be.” He lifted up his shirt. There were bruises all along his body, but he couldn’t tell which were from getting hit by this car, and which were from getting hit by the driver. “I’m starting to wonder if my body’s indestructible. No matter what I do, it won’t seem to let me go.”

The pretty girl frowned at his words and twisted back around into the front seat.

A second later, they pulled off the shoulder and sped down the blank stretch of a sun-bleached two-lane road again. Hyojong sat up, ignoring the protest of every bone and muscle in his body, and he leaned up between the two front seats. He had no clue where they were, very little recollection of agreeing to come with them, but he figured that there was no harm in going along – if they were going to kill him, they’d had plenty of chances starting with their first meeting. Although, now that he thought about it, he didn’t remember any introductions.

“I’m Hyojong, by the way.” He shoved a hand into the front seat, offering it first to the pretty girl, and then to the driver, who frowned at it, but grudgingly shook. “What are your names?”

Judging by the way they glanced at each other curiously, Hyojong didn’t think they’d introduced themselves to each other yet either. He grinned and hung his arms around the headrests of each seat. The radio buzzed its way through another shitty pop song, and Hyojong reached forward to shut it off.

The driver made a noise of displeasure at that, and if he didn’t speak up soon, Hyojong was going to start calling him Grumpy.

“I’m Hui.” He said after another few long seconds of no one speaking.

“Good. And you, darling?” Hyojong turned to look at the girl.

She really was beautiful. She nibbled at her pink, pink lips and her brown eyes darted their focus around in front of her, as if she was chasing the words to put them together. She brushed a section of her fiery orange, almost red, hair out of her face behind her ear. So many nervous habits contained within one girl, but finally she did answer.

“You can call me Hyuna.”

“Hannah?” Hui asked, turning his head to look at her. She corrected him, “Hyuna.”

Hyojong smiled and drummed his hands on the headrests before Hui threw him a look in the rearview mirror that said if he didn’t stop he was throwing him out of the moving car. Hyojong stopped, but he still smiled as he said, “So... Hyojong, Hui, and Hyuna. Cool. Now, how did each of us come to be on this little trip to nowhere and anywhere?”

Maybe he imagined it, but both of his newly found companions seemed to pale.

“Fine, then. I’ll talk.”

And he did. Hyojong may not have appreciated much of his life, may have wished a thousand times that he was dead, but there was at least one thing he loved and that was talking about himself. Especially if he was hurling his problems at someone else, possibly in an attempt to make them deal with them for him. The funny thing was that he’d never had a therapist, the very sort of person that you pay to listen to you talk about yourself so they can deal with your problems for you. As he sat in that car, watching the front end of the car eat miles and miles of sun-bleached road, Hyojong talked about his feeling of imminent death, the internal war between the abyss and immortality, and his many, many suicide attempts.

When he was done talking, Hyuna blinked over at him, face paler than normal, and part of Hyojong wondered if he’d taken it too far. Maybe she didn’t want to hear about the time he tried to get a girl to strangle him to death in the middle of sex, or the time when he laid down in a bathtub and tried to taste the bubbles in his lungs.

He closed his mouth.

Everything was silent except for the rumbling of the road and the awkward noise of the malfunctioning air conditioning. Hyojong waited for one of them to speak, to tell their story.

Hyuna sighed and twisted her hair around her shoulder, creating something like a curtain between her and the boys. Hyojong leaned back a bit, ready to listen, expecting it to be some story about her parents ignoring her or refusing her something – she looked like the kind of girl that would run away to get attention from her parents. What he didn’t expect was the very first line of her story.

“I killed a man.”

Hui’s hands jerked on the steering wheel and the car veered headlong across the yellow lines in the middle of the road. Luckily, there hadn’t been any other cars on this road for nearly an hour, so he safely pulled back into their lane. He didn’t stop, but he did look over at Hyuna in the passenger seat. Hyojong leaned all the way back until his head rested back against the seat, and he whistled lowly.

“I didn’t mean to, but I work – worked in a barber shop, and the guy who made deliveries came in earlier and mentioned he needed a haircut.” Her hands shivered in her lap and in her hair as she reached up to braid it. She breathed out jaggedly, heavily, but continued, “He came back last night after the shop closed, and I’d just started to shave his beard when I felt his hands on me, and I pushed him off, but he came after me again, and when I pushed him off the last time, he fell and hit his head.”

Her story cut off with a sound like she was choking, and Hui turned the wheel as if to pull off the road again, but Hyuna reached over and laid her hand on his arm. “Don’t. I’m fine – I mean, I’m not fine, not really. But keep driving.”

She told them all about how she cleaned up the shop, hid the body and ditched it, and then she ran away. “I came with you, Hui, because I can’t go back there. I can’t go home. I’m guilty of murder.” She spit those words out and turned to look out the window. Hyojong leaned forward once again, and his hand hovered an inch away from her arm. He wasn’t sure if he could touch her; he understood that she was probably in a sensitive place at the moment, and he imagined that the touch of another man might repulse her after what that guy did to her. After a moment, he decided better not to touch her, and he slid his hand back onto his lap.

* * *

She wasn’t sure why she told them that her name was Hyuna. Maybe it was because just like her Desdemona persona, Desire died in a sudden moment, and she had to become someone else. Desdemona was full of dreams for a bright future. Desire lived in a world where dreams were only just that. She wondered who Hyuna would be now – she couldn’t be the girl she’d been back before Desdemona again. Maybe she’d told them her real name because she longed for life to go back to how it used to be so long ago when things were still simple.

The car fell silent after her story ended, and she stared out the window, watching the deserted landscape blur by. Dry bushes and dirt, brown birds and black wires. Everything outside the window looked dull and dry and dead. She felt like she could smell rot in the air – or maybe that was his blood still dried under her fingernails, still clinging to the strands of her hair.

She shivered.

In the backseat, Hyojong started moving around again, and she felt him grip onto the back of her seat and tug himself forward. He appeared like a ghost at the edge of her vision.

“What about you, Hui?” He asked.

Hyuna turned away from the window to look at Hui. Even in the daylight, she still thought he was beautiful, a fallen angel come to save her from her path. Hyojong was beautiful too – his face glowed in the sunlight, his hair actually appeared to be a halo, and his eyes were such a shocking shade of blue considering that he was Asian, just like her and just like Hui. Hyuna thought that maybe he was an angel too – perhaps a holy angel despite the aura of darkness that clung to him and his past.

Hui didn’t seem to want to answer, which Hyuna thought was dumb. She’d told her story, and there wasn’t likely to be a story he could tell that would turn out any worse.

She twisted around in the seat, drawing her knees up to her chest. “Tell us, Hui. What started you on this journey?”

He glanced in the rearview mirror and both of the side mirrors. He twisted his grip on the steering wheel, and then sighed. Such a heavy sigh.

“I’ve got over one million dollars in cash in the trunk.” Hui readjusted his grip on the steering wheel again.

Hyuna laughed. “You’re lying. You’ve got to be lying.”

Hui shook his head with a mad, crooked grin. “Nope. Do I look like I’m lying?”

From the backseat Hyojong’s muffled, “With that wack ass grin you’re sporting, yeah you do look a little bit like you’re lying, buddy.” Hui glanced in the rearview mirror, then he twisted around to take a look, and Hyuna turned too.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Hui asked.

Hyojong was flat on his back, one hand covering his face, the other jammed down his pants. “I’m not jerking off if that’s what you’re asking.” He pulled his hand out of his pants and slid the other one off his face to stare dead at Hui. “Shouldn’t you be looking at the road while you’re driving, or are you trying to hit someone else with the car so they can join us?”

Hui turned back around in his seat. Hyuna still looked back at Hyojong, who just smiled sweetly up at her and blew a kiss. She slipped back around to face front.

“You’ve got to be lying, Hui. Where does someone just get over a million dollars in cash, anyway?” Hyuna asked.

“They steal it.” Hui drummed his fingers against the steering wheel.

“What, like you robbed a bank or something?” Hyojong sat up in the backseat, the seat’s fabric squealing as he moved. Now his head took up most of the rearview mirror, and he had a hand on each of the front seat head rests. “Are you like a real criminal or something?”

“No more than she is.” Hui nodded over at Hyuna, and her stomach bottomed out. Nausea and panic hit her like a train. Neither of the boys seemed to notice at all. “But I’ve never killed someone.”

The three of them fell silent then, and the only sound filling the car was the rumbling of the road beneath their tires.

“So who did you steal it from?” Hyojong asked.

“I thought you didn’t really believe me?” Hui reached back to swat at Hyojong’s hand that had snaked its way around to play with the ends of his hair. “Why’re you talking now like you do?”

Hyuna shoved down her panic and decided to focus entirely on the sound of their voices, on the ridiculous bickering that she could already tell was going to drive her crazy.

“I’m not saying I _do_ believe, but let’s just say I’m being this was to keep me from getting bored. I can play the devil’s advocate on either side of the argument, you know. I believe that you do have that much money in the back of the car, but also, I really don’t because why the fuck would you, you know.”

“Well, I am on the run.”

Hyojong shrugged. “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean you’d be carrying around that much cash. And why would you tell us if you did? You don’t know us from Adam. Maybe Hyuna and I are just waiting for the right time to get you off and steal your cash.”

“I think you mean –“

“I know what I mean.” Hui glanced up into the rearview mirror again, and Hyuna looked back at Hyojong just in time to see him wink. Hui rolled his eyes and stared straight out at the road. Hyojong continued on, “But really, I don’t believe you. Everything about you looks like a lie, buddy. You’ve got all those bruises and stuff, but you don’t look like a fighter; and those clothes don’t even look like they’re yours. They don’t fit you right at all.”

As soon as he said that, Hyuna decided that she had to agree. His clothes were large and surprisingly worn for being such nice clothes. His hands on the steering wheel looked soft beneath the bruising, as if he rarely used them for anything. Maybe everything about him was a lie.

“If you do truly have that much cash in the trunk, where’d you get it?” She asked after another few moments of agitated silence where Hyojong tapped out a rhythm on the backs of the seats, where Hui kept gripping the steering wheel tighter and tighter. He didn’t answer her right away, so she prompted him. “Hui?”

Surprisingly, Hui’s scowl was a deep, powerful looking expression. He sighed, and then spit out the words like they pained him.

“I robbed a Chinese gang.”

“No shit!” Crowed Hyojong, pounding his fist on the back of Hui’s headrest. “How the hell did you do that?”

Suddenly, Hui jerked the steering wheel to the right, and Hyuna had to hold on to the sides of the seat to stop herself from cracking her head against the window. He pulled the car over off the road into an old abandoned gas station, and then he turned around in his seat, to once again face the boy in the back. “Get out.”

“What? Why? Because I insulted you? Hey, you can’t just leave me on the side of the road!” Hyojong fell back and folded his arms across his chest. “Girl, tell him he can’t just leave me here.”

Hyuna folded her arms across her chest and looked out her window. She refused to answer to “girl.” She’d had several names in her life but Girl was one that she wouldn’t answer to, especially when it was used in the commanding tone that Hyojong used.

Hui sighed, “I’m not leaving you. We’re all getting out. I’m going to show you I’m not lying. About anything.” He unbuckled his seatbelt and threw the door open, letting in waves of debilitating heat. Neither Hyuna nor Hyojong moved to follow him out.

Hyuna was a bit scared of the crazy look in Hui’s eyes. It had been hours and hours since he’d slept, and it was really starting to show. The whites of his eyes were turning pink, his left eye was twitching slightly, and his anger flared up quickly – although Hyuna wasn’t entirely sure if that was uncommon, since they’d only known each other for a few hours now. But when Hui slammed his hand down on the roof of the car, she jumped and Hyojong swore quietly in the back seat.

“Get the fuck out, you two. Come on, come around back.” Hui slammed the door shut and disappeared around the back of the car.

Hyuna hesitated, and glanced back over her shoulder at Hyojong. His face still looked pale like he was still hung over from whatever he’d done to himself the night before, but he shrugged when she gestured toward the door. Hyuna waited until he’d climbed out of the back seat before she opened her door and unfolded out into the bright yellow sunlight and the dry heat.

The ground below her feet sparkled like there were diamonds embedded in the old, sun-faded asphalt, lost in a time when this gas station had played host to more than a dirty white Toyota carrying around a load of two fugitives, one run away, and more than a million stolen dollars. Hyuna spread her arms above her head and then bent over to touch her toes, stretching out the tight muscles of her back and groaning as her back popped.

Hyojong leaned against the back door of the car, his head tilted back to look up at the open blue sky above them – so drained of moisture by the sun that it was nearly white. Hui was bent over the trunk of the car, fumbling a set of keys, searching for the one to unlock the trunk. Hyuna felt sweat rolling down her spine just from the few moments she’d been standing out in the heat. She swiped a hand over her forehead, and collapsed down onto the stone plinth where one of the station’s two gas pumps sat.

Her hair was sticking to the back of her neck, already damp around her temples, and she swore at the sun god for making it such a warm day, before she took the hair band off her wrist and twisted her hair up into a messy bun on the top of her head. A barely-there breeze licked at the sweat on the back of her neck, cooling her off only slightly.

With a loud shrieking groan, the trunk finally flipped open.

For a brief moment in time, Hyuna thought Hui was speaking in tongues, revealing his true fallen angel nature to her in a moment of weakness. And then she realized that he was swearing – the sound almost lyrical in the expert way that he weaved swear words together, and he even seemed to be bringing in expletives from other languages as well.

Just as Hyojong swung around the back end of the car, Hyuna stood up. The song of swearing became a duet, and Hyuna danced over to join Hui and Hyojong in their song.


	8. Chapter 8

The contents of the Toyota’s trunk was a sight for fucking sore eyes. Hui couldn’t believe it, but there was the bag of Chinese gang money, spilled over on its side, and the cash was all there. Honestly, Hui felt like the cash had multiplied since he’d last seen it. There had to be more than a million in there.

“Holy shit!” Hyojong screamed and he vanished from Hui’s side.

Hyuna started giggling and Hui couldn’t help but smile as well. His cheeks ached and his bottom lip felt like it was splitting open again. Even when he noticed that the hand Hyuna was covering her giggle with was still covered in small spots of blood, he couldn’t stop smiling.

Hyojong was spinning in circles in the abandoned lot, running around with his large shirt flapping like wings, like an idiot singing a song that Hui recognized as being from a kids movie, something about being thrown together and having to stay together. Hyuna’s melancholy nature seemed to have finally thawed out, and for the first time, Hui looked at her and saw the sun instead of the moon. She was beaming, radiant, and when she smiled all her aches and worries from the night before sloughed off, and she ran over to join Hyojong.

They sang the dumb song at the top of their lungs, wrapped their arms around each other and danced over the cracked, uneven lot like they were little kids who didn’t know any better. They sang the song all over again, repeating to the birds, to the sun, to the distant shadow of clouds that working together is the best way to be.

Hui easily could’ve stopped the fun then.

He could’ve slammed the trunk shut and climbed in the driver’s seat and been gone before either Hyuna or Hyojong could reach him. He could’ve told them that the cash was his and they wouldn’t see a cent of it. He could’ve done any number of things, but when he gently closed the trunk and locked it again, he leaned back against it and watched his two companions act like fucking fools. Who was he to shit on their parade? The song they were singing was right – no matter what happened now, tonight had been one of those deciding moments in a person’s life where their path branches off and whichever way they take, there’s no turning back – they were in this together, and he couldn’t leave them and he couldn’t keep his new found wealth from them either.

He stretched out on the back of his new car, and let the heat of the sun soak into his bones and burn against the still fresh wounds on his face. Fire blazed against the backs of his eyelids and the lightest breath of wind he’d ever known cooled the sweat on his chest and neck and face, but it was enough and he soon found that he was dozing off, pulled under like he was caught in an undertow.

It had been an entire day since he’d last slept, but even with Hui’s brain screaming at him to sleep, to give in fully to the lull of unconsciousness, he knew that the world he’d chosen at the fork in the road meant that he could never sleep soundly again. His world had become one where sleeping too deeply may result in being found by the mafia, a knife between his ribs, and his last breath dying before it could be released.

“Hui!” Hyuna’s call was soft from across the parking lot, but it still jolted him awake, and he sat up, shoving his greasy, sweaty hair off his face. “Hui! Get up!”

Hyojong was running ahead of Hyuna, his shirt flapping again, and her sunny hair was tumbling loose around her face. They were still laughing, smiling like they were high off the smell of cash, so he wasn’t too worried, but nevertheless he slid off the back of the car, and he’d just turned the key in the ignition when Hyojong threw himself into the backseat, and Hyuna fell into the seat beside Hui, her hand reaching for his on the gear shift.

“We should go shopping.” She told him, and he had to agree. For one, her face when she said that was like the innocent demand of a happy child. Also, he could see the blood stain on her jean shorts, and he knew that it would never pass as one of those blood stains that may show up on a woman’s clothes occasionally. On top of both of those reasons, the heavy beating of his heart told Hui that they would probably be on the run for a while, living from the car or hotel rooms, and they couldn’t just wear these same clothes every day – life isn’t like a cartoon where the characters only have one outfit.

“We’ve got the cash,” Hyojong laughed, throwing his arms around the headrests again, a habit that was really grating on Hui’s nerves. “And we should get some food. I have some candy bars in my pockets, but they’re probably broken or melted by now.” His hand appeared between Hui and Hyuna, and Hui looked down at the crumpled chocolate bars. His stomach growled.

They definitely needed food. And showers. “Maybe we should get a hotel room too. Hyuna, no offense, but you definitely need to clean up. You’ve still got blood on you in places. And Hyojong, man, you’ve got puke down the front of your shirt.”

“And you’re covered in blood, too.” Hyuna reminded him.

He nodded. “Exactly. Shopping, hotel, food. Sound good?”

The other two nodded in agreement. Hui shifted the car into drive and pulled back out on their worn road to anywhere.

Four hours later, they’d made it.

A deluxe room in a hotel in a city they’d never been to. Bright lights shone outside the windows, voices echoed through the hallways as people got ready to go out for the night, down to the casinos and clubs and other revels that the city has to offer. Hui was stretched out on the bed nearest the door, Hyojong was smoking a joint in the armchair beside the cracked open balcony door, and Hyuna was in the shower and had been for over half an hour. Hui figured that she needed the time – both because she was a girl and he’d never known a woman that could take a short shower, and also because she was probably scrubbing at every inch of her skin until she felt like there was no more blood on her. He wondered if she realized that she’d probably never feel completely clean again.

The TV mounted on the wall at the foot of the bed buzzed to life and Hui looked away from the shadows on the ceiling. Hyojong had the remote in one hand and the other was raking through his messy hair, still dirty since Hyuna had taken the shower as soon as they got into the room. Bags and bags of new clothes sat on the desk and the counter of the tiny kitchenette; they’d spent hundreds at the clothing stores, but the brilliant thing was they still had hundreds of thousands left.

Hui chuckled to himself and rolled over to the nightstand between the two beds. His phone sat silent, face down on the surface, still dead to the world even though he’d plugged it in fifteen minutes ago. While most of his mind was still shouting “Fuck Tucker!” another part of him wondered what had happened to his friend, what had the gang done to him?

Lights flickered in the corner of his vision as Hyojong surfed through the channels, but finally he stopped on a news channel. Hui turned to look at the trumpeting sound of the nightly news broadcast.

He didn’t care about the pretty young woman who sat behind a desk, reading off whatever mishaps had occurred in the world, he didn’t even notice when the man beside her kept clearly checking out her rack, what Hui did notice was the date on the box in the bottom right corner.

“It’s my sister’s birthday.” He murmured, more to himself than anyone else.

“What?” Hyojong asked, too busy flicking ash off the end of the joint to really pay any attention to what Hui was saying.

“My little sister turns two today.” Hui sat up and picked up his phone again, momentarily forgetting that it was about as useful as a brick until the battery decided to charge. “It’s kind of funny, if you think about it. My dad threw me out because I wasn’t safe for her to be around, and now she’s turning two on the day after I robbed a wealthy Chinese gang and ran away in a stolen car where I picked up a murderess and a suicidal boy, who I hit with my car and nearly beat to death.”

Hyojong coughed, and Hui looked over just to see that Hyojong was staring at him. He coughed again, stubbed the joint out on the arm of the chair, and tossed it out the cracked open balcony door. “You’ve got a fucked up sense of humor, buddy. Literally no part of what you said is funny, and I’m probably high, so if I’m not laughing, you’ve got to know that it’s not funny.” His head lolled back against the seat.

The news trumpeted again, and Hui looked back to the bright screen and the pretty faces as they began reporting on some dumb celebrity baby who’d been born with another shitty name that they’ll definitely be beat up for when they’re old enough to go to school. Hui fell back against the pillows again, and closed his eyes. His stomach growled and his phone vibrated against the nightstand.

“I’m fucking starved,” Hyojong grumbled. “I’m ordering room service.”

Hui probably should’ve stopped him. They were paying in cash, which the man working the desk in the lobby was already pretty suspicious of, and Hui wasn’t sure if they could order room service when they were paying cash. But he was starving so he didn’t argue. Instead he reached for his cell phone.

The thing kept vibrating in his hand as the screen filled with texts from Tucker, from some of his other friends, messages from girls who were looking to hook up for the night, notifications from all sorts of social media apps. One notification from his father.

_It’s Emma’s birthday today. I wasn’t sure if you would remember. Karen and I are hosting a party at the house this afternoon at 3, and if you do show up you’d better be sober and on your best behavior. This is an olive branch, Hui. Don’t fuck it up._

Hui scoffed and swiped the message off the screen. Clearly he wouldn’t be making it back home in time for the party in an hour. And even if he could, Hui knew that he was still far too much of a disappointment to his father to be allowed to stay.

Hyojong was mumbling into the room’s phone, glancing at the menu in his hands. Hui thought he heard something about steak, smoked salmon, three strawberry milkshakes, and their largest size of steak fries with a side of barbecue sauce. Hui watched as Hyojong flipped through the menu, running his fingers over the laminated pages, and that’s when Hui noticed that even though Hyojong was acting like he was perfectly fine, there was a dark shadow of a bruise blossoming under the skin of his arm. If he really looked at it, Hui thought the bruise resembled the grill of the Toyota.

The shower shut off on the other side of the wall beside Hui. He heard the sound of the shower door opening and closing. Quiet humming echoed through the wall before it was swallowed by the annoying roar of a hair dryer. After a moment, Hyojong ended his call to room service, and he moved across the room to sit at the foot of Hui’s bed.

“Food should be up anywhere between twenty minutes and forty.” He flopped back so that he was lying across Hui’s feet. “I hope you know I’m sleeping with you tonight. I refuse to sleep on the floor, and it would be pretty rude to make Hyuna sleep with one of us, wouldn’t it?”

Hui kicked at Hyojong. “Get off me. We do not have to sleep in the same bed.”

“So you’re going to take the floor?” Hyojong crawled up the bed and laid his head down on the pillow beside Hui’s face. “That’s noble of you since you did hit me with your car. Excuse me, your _stolen_ car. That’s a fun little tidbit of information you conveniently hadn’t mentioned until just a few minutes ago.”

The bathroom door opened, and in a billow of steam, Hyuna stepped out, her body covered with a towel, and her hair wrapped in one of those cool towel turbans that Hui had never learned how girls do. She turned to look at the two of them on the bed, her brown eyes wide and red like she’d gotten shampoo in her eye or she’d been crying. Hui thought that the latter was far more likely. She pulled the towel tighter around her chest. “Do either of you know which bags have my new clothes?”

By the time Hyuna located her clothes and dressed in the bathroom, room service had arrived.

“We’re eating like kings, darling!” Hyojong called when she emerged from the bathroom. Hui slapped Hyojong’s shoulder since he was shoveling food into his mouth as quickly as possible. He’d already inhaled most of the fries, half of one of the milkshakes, and was working on the steak. “Come join us, Hyuna.”

She looked lovely, scrubbed clean and all shiny. Her hair truly seemed like liquid fire. There wasn’t a spot of blood on her anymore. She was dressed in Gucci and Adidas, so basically there was over six thousand dollars worth of new clothing hanging off her thin frame. She curled around a pillow and reached for a milkshake and the fries.

Hui thought she looked beautiful. Her hair hung loose around her shoulders and she closed her eyes blissfully as she sucked on the straw of the milkshake. Hui didn’t even hear Hyojong speaking until the other guy kicked at him, nearly knocking the milkshake out of Hui’s hands.

“What?”

“I said, let’s go out. There’s so much to do in a place like this. We drove passed, like, a dozen clubs on the way here, man.”

“We can’t go out. Don’t be stupid.”

“Why not?” Hyojong folded his arms over his chest like a petulant child. His milkshake glass and the steak’s plate were empty, but there was still a hunger in his eyes. “Because you’re both criminals? A murderer and a thief?”

Hyuna blinked without a word. Hui noticed the softening of her eyes as if she was no longer seeing the room in front of her, but some distant place.

“That’s exactly why.” Hui spoke dangerously low. “If anyone’s looking for Hyuna, or if the mafia’s looking for me, a club is probably not a good place to be.”

Hyojong snorted out a laugh. “Right. We’re several hours away from home, man. For all those people know, the two of you are still hiding out back there. And besides, I doubt anyone’s looking for either of you.”

“Fuck you.” Hui mumbled.

Hyojong grinned, wildly wide. “Thanks, but I’m good. I’d rather go get fucked up in a club. I don’t wanna go alone, though.”

A burst of sound from the TV had Hyuna flinching on the bed, startled by the sudden rise in volume from the news alert.

The same woman and man from earlier appeared on the screen. Big letters sat on a bar at the bottom, spelling out BREAKING NEWS.

Hui looked away, intent on eating the last few fries before Hyojong could inhale them. It was only when he heard the name of their home town that his ears perked up again.

Hyojong and Hyuna were both staring at the screen.

“...and the believed serial killer reigning over the streets there. Police chief Kevin Tang made a statement claiming this to be the fifth victim of the killer. Each victim thus far has been a young man between twenty and thirty, of varying races, sexualities, and class. Thus far, the victim remains unidentified, but due to the manner of disposal, the Police chief is certain that this is another victim of the Rainy Day Killer.”

Hui’s mouth went dry, and he clenched his hands into fists. He was going off nothing, but the lack of detail in the news story had horrible images flashing through his guilty mind. He saw Tucker surrounded by those gangsters, re-imagined the encounter in the back of the gambling den, with a cold barrel of a pistol pressed to Tucker’s temple or Tucker beaten into a bloody pulp and left abandoned somewhere dead or dying.

“Hyuna, you okay?”

Once again, it was Hyojong’s voice that drew Hui out of his own mind. The other boy was moving across the room to sit beside Hyuna on the bed. She was trembling, her eyes shut tight, and tears leaking down her cheeks. Hyojong folded his legs in front of himself and sat facing her. Hui didn’t miss the way that Hyuna jerked slightly as Hyojong put a hand on her knee in what was probably meant to be a comforting gesture, but given her recent experiences, it very likely didn’t come across that way.

“It’s him. It’s got to be him.” Hyuna cried softy, shaking her head.

“What are you talking about?” Hyojong leaned back, and Hui was glad he was giving her some space.

“The news. It was him. I’m sure of it.”

“Hyuna,” Hui moved to sit beside her as well. “It’s probably not him. They think it’s a victim of a serial killer. Unless you somehow accidentally killed someone in the same style as a serial killer, I doubt it’s him.” He didn’t mention Tucker to them. That would only complicate everything.

Hyojong nodded. “Yeah, like, they didn’t mention that they think it could be anyone other than that serial killer.”

They lapsed into silence then as Hyuna hiccupped her way out of tears.

The sounds of the city echoed through the window –sirens and thumping music. Hyojong laughed softly after a few minutes. “Well, at least they didn’t mention anything about a beat-up boy driving a stolen car or a girl matching your description. I don’t know about either of you, but for me, the best way to get my mind off of anything is to go out and get wasted at a club.” He grinned. “Now we know your faces aren’t on the news, you have no excuse for us not to go out. We’ve got the clothes, we’ve got the money. Let’s go.”

Hyuna’s reaction surprised Hui.

She started laughing, almost hysterically, and reached out to grip Hyojong’s arm. “You’re right. Let’s do it.”

Ten minutes and a very rushed shower later, Hui was dressed in fresh expensive clothes, staring his reflection down in the mirror beside the room’s door, hoping that girls in the club thought that his bruises and scrapes were sexy.

Hyojong threw an arm over his shoulders. “Let’s fucking go!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is exactly as much of this fic as I've written. I've had all this written for a while, and I finally decided it's time I just posted it. I'll try to write more and post it, but no promises.

**Author's Note:**

> Please leave me kudos and comments! I'll update soon!


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